Memory Games
by Elbbsas
Summary: Before her summer holiday with her cousins, Ellen Tennyson receives scattered memories that don't belong to her. This alone would make her holiday unsettling, but within a few hours of their first stop her family discover two alien watches. (Series retelling of Ben 10 with an OC and an extra Omnitrix).
1. It Takes Two To Tangle

–cue, the birds pause in their song. No longer do they share their merry tunes or interrupt the shining moment that is Pythia. They hold their breaths in their wonder. And on cue, a sunbeam filters though the distant window, dancing across Pythia's heels. And on cue, Pythia raises her head like a dignified, yet terrified, queen. Ellen said it once and will proudly say it again: Pythia looks beautiful in white. She deserves to look that way. Years of waiting led up to now, this singular moment, when Pythia can look as beautiful as how she acted day by day.

'Are you sure?' Pythia asks. Ellen lets out a sigh and buries her face in one hand. She doesn't need to turn her head to see Pythia's face. Ellen knows Pythia's shoulders have slumped back into a slouch. It's easily visible without Pythia's jerseys.

Steady on, Ellen.

'Thia. _Thia_.'

Ellen takes hold of Pythia's shoulder. She does her best to affix to Pythia a serious stare, one prepared to insert sanity into the situation.

She isn't sure she succeeded.

'You're gorgeous,' Ellen emphasises. 'You're fab. Sam is going to forget his lines because you look so good.'

Her eyes grow wide. 'I don't– I don't want him to forget!' she stutters.

Ellen tries not to sigh again. She fails. Again. Pythia's nerves slip into a puffed-up chook's frown. Even that fails to help, since Pythia turns back to the mirror.

'I'm not ready for this,' Pythia says. Her breathing quickens. 'I'm not ready, Nora. We, no I'm sure it'll be fine, it'll be fine, don't look at me like that this is what I sound like when I'm fine–'

'Thia!' Ellen's voice finally snaps Pythia from her spiral. 'Look at me. You're wearing the dress. That's all that's happening today. You're just overwhelmed because you can see it happening. It's been a long time coming. You are ready. Relax. Count to ten. Take a breath. Chill.'

Pythia's hand clasps around Ellen's arms. She trembles, quick enough that Ellen feels her vibrate. Pythia's hand stays clasped around Ellen's bracelet, pinning it against Ellen's skin. Ellen carefully pats Pythia and tries to be a comfort.

Pythia steadies her breathing.

'You're right, you're right,' she says. 'I'm overemotional. That's all.'

'See? There's my sister in law to be. Rational as always.'

With an unlady-like snort, Pythia says, 'You're the rational–

xxxXXXxxx

–didn't like her one little bit. 'Why do we have to pick up your stupid girlfriend!' Ellen complains. She's dug her foots into the ground the whole way there and Sam _still_ isn't listening!

'Nora!' Sam snaps. 'She's not my girlfriend! Stop acting like–'

'Is too is too!' Ellen tries to pull out of Sam's grip but he's big and dumb and fat and so are all of his fat fingers! He's gonna break her bracelet with his taking! 'Sam and pee-ah, sitting in the tree, dragging me along in your piles of pee!'

'Ugh! Stop being insufferable!'

'Only person suffering is me!'

'You're doing this on purpose, I know it, so you are not getting any sym– sympa– I'm not going to listen to you!' Sam stops walking but he doesn't start walking home, so Ellen keeps pulling. 'Come _on_. You barely even know her. Who knows, maybe you'll find something in common.'

'The only thing we have in common is you, and I don't even like you.' Ellen pauses, then adds after a moment, 'And you're smelly. You stepped in dog poo on the walk.'

'No, I didn't.'

Then Sam scoops her up off the floor into the air, and Ellen starts screaming.

'Put me down! Sam! Sam, put me down, put me down, put me down right–

xxxXXXxxx

–all this?'

Ellen didn't startle, or accidentally knock her water over. Any water on her desk is completely accidental and unrelated to Sam's girlfriend suddenly talking to her from behind. Ellen grabs a towel and slams her arms on it. God, don't be ruined.

Ellen peeks. They're fine.

'Hi, Pythia,' Ellen says. She turns. As usual, Pythia's in her shapeless sweater. 'It's not much. Essays and stuff, you know how it is.' Ellen plays with her bracelet absently. Hopefully she leaves. Nobody cares about essays.

Weirdly, Pythia's eyes light up. 'Really? Can I see?'

'I– um. If you like?' Ellen tosses the towel away and carefully checks over the page. The water's blotted out. Ellen would feel much better if it was completely dry. Good thing it's only a draft, and a draft for fun as well.

There's a presence at her shoulder. Ellen wordlessly passes the page to Pythia and finds her pen. What was she up to? Oh, right, the unmoved mover summary, how it causes motion through narcissism.

Pythia stays weirdly quiet as she reads and Ellen writes. Ellen checks every few seconds. But Pythia doesn't leave. That is strange. She honestly thought she'd have gotten bored and gone off to find Sam by now.

'...How old are you?' Pythia eventually asks.

Ellen can't help but snap, 'You've known me since I was five. Aren't you supposed to be good at math, like Sam?'

'Sam's always been better at it,' Pythia says fondly. 'Let's see. Sam was eleven, so–'

Before Pythia can finish Ellen cuts in. 'Fifteen. There, now you don't need to calculate your ten-year anniversary.'

Pythia flushes bright red. 'We are– you um, that isn't what I was um. A-anyway, you're fifteen and you're writing this?'

'What else am I gonna do? Math?' Ellen says. She lets her voice ooze with contempt, letting it flood along the floor and stain Pythia's pristine shoes. 'And I didn't come up with any of that. I've been reading a bunch of books and I've been getting annoyed at losing my translations of it, so I'm making them pretty so I don't lose them while I'm reading. They're funny. Lots of old people thinking about how the world works and stuff, and they come up with some interesting things like um, this one guy, he had this theory about how 'cause of how perception works everything you perceive is doubtable _except_ the fact you're doubting it. So, if you know anything at all to be a hundred percent true, it's that you are real.' Ellen pulls a face. 'Sorry, I'm not explaining it well. That's why I wrote it down. But, I lost those notes. And I can't find the book.'

The room falls silent. Outside, a bird sings a soft, piping tune.

Eventually Pythia looks up from the page.

'You write better essays than I do,' she says, handing it–

xxxXXXxxx

–looks even more nervous than Pythia did. Ellen cricks her back. Time to teach her idiot brother to suck it up and stop stalling. He's getting married for goodness sake! As she walks closer Sam's pacing doesn't change. But she does hear him muttering utter nonsense. It's mostly self-doubt and panic, so Ellen doesn't give it any of the attention it deserves.

'You know, usually it's the bride that's late,' Ellen jokes.

Sam gives a panicked little hum. 'I'm not late,' he says, like the words are fighting him. 'Wai– what are you doing here, aren't you supposed to be with…?'

Ellen nods, grinning.

Her brother looks like he desperately wants to swear. Think of the children.

'Where's your entourage gone?' Ellen asks. She hooks her arm into his elbow and starts tugging him. 'Come on. They know where they're supposed to be, I'll get Uncle Damion to call them if we get there first.'

'N– you don't need to– Nora I–'

'What?' A dark pit plunges and Ellen whips around. Sam doesn't look like he's caught a case of terminal stupidity. 'What's wrong?'

'I… it's nothing.' Sam swallows, thickly, like there's a lump in his throat.

Ellen contemplates murder. 'Samuel Arthur Reeds,' she says in a low voice, almost a growl. 'I have known you both for twenty years. You do not get to prove me right, not now.'

Instantly Ellen is relieved, because Sam's eyes fly wide in shock. 'What?! No! That's not at all what's going on!'

'Good. Talk, now.'

'I don't think I should tell you.'

'_Sam._'

'No look, I. Can I borrow the phone?'

What? Ellen gives him a questioning stare. No answers come forth, just pleading eyes and worry. Ellen shakes her head even as she hooks around her handbag. Her bracelet slides up her arm as it goes, catching her skin. It takes her a moment to find the phone Pythia gave her. 'Why do you want it?' Ellen asks.

Sam swallows again. 'I think– I mean, I just….' He kneads his forehead with a knuckle and then turns back to Ellen. 'Let me start again. I need to check something with Thia. I have to do it before the wedding, because I don't know if she'll want to marry me after I check.'

He hesitates. His next words leave him in a rush.

'And I won't want to ask her after, because I don't know–'

Ellen shuts him up by planting the phone in his chest. 'Idiot,' she says fondly. 'Twenty years. The two of you love each other. No matter what you say, she'll stick with you… unless you're a serial killer, in which case _I_ would be morally obligated to do something and marriage is a whole different ball park.'

Five minutes pass. Ellen kept distant enough that she didn't hear a word, even kept her eyes on the floor so she couldn't be tempted into guessing. Eventually she hears Sam walking back. She can clearly hear relief in his tone, and the quiet 'Love you too, babe, see you in a few,' settles all her own worries. Ellen doesn't give a hint of them. She puts on her smile.

'See? Now come _on!_ You're supposed to be standing by the altar getting more and more nervous over Thia's dramatic entrance! Hurry up, let's move–

xxxXXXxxx

–spat out her drink, if she had one. Ellen doesn't. She chokes on her own tongue instead.

'Of course not!' she says. She sternly points at Sam. 'Just because you're married and need to hurry and fulfil your ultimate purpose in life–'

'Which is loving me,' Pythia adds with a giggle.

'–yes, exactly,' Ellen acknowledges, then turns back to Sam, 'does not mean I am. I need to know them for twenty years. It's traditional.'

Sam snorts at that. He slings an arm around Ellen's shoulder as well, guiding them both down the street. It looks like it will rain, later, again. Meandering, they start working their way back to the bridge stairs. It's a lovely evening. Ellen's face aches from smiling.

'I'm never going to forget today,' Sam announces. They slip free so they can start down the stairs. Ellen darts a little ahead so Pythia can walk beside him.

It's the right choice. Pythia gives Sam a nudge. 'I won't let you!' she proclaims.

Laughing, Ellen half turns to get them both in view. She grips the bannister. God, they're amazing. Sam and Pythia, perfectly matched, and Sam's stage fright doesn't seem to be anywhere in sight. A knot of tension leaves Ellen.

'This is only step one. Next is having lots of–'

The bannister's gone.

Her foot skids.

Ellen shrieks.

Her arm wheels, cracking into the wall.

No purchase.

It slides down.

So does she, world tipping.

Her shoulder hits the stairs, then the back of her head.

'Eleanor!'

She's still moving, she realises, step after step flee from under her feet.

Her arms are numb.

Sam and Pythia are framed in the night light.

How many stairs are left?

Pythia dives for her, eyes wide.

None.

Pressure–

–her back hits the wall. Somehow she has the presence of mind to grab an old, dusty pillow and ram her head into it. She's just in time to catch her scream. Bad idea. She chokes on the dust. Ellen rears back. Her palms slap into the old wood floor and she coughs, her lungs and ribs protesting under the strain.

What just happened?!

Did she– she just, she just died. Ellen feels cold all over. As her coughs subside she finds a hand on the back of her neck. Not a hand, her hand. It's whole. Her neck is whole, intact, the opposite of broken. But, she died.

Ellen feels like a milkshake. Someone shook up her insides and started sharing them around a room, now they each start slurping at different rates, some adding sprinkles and some picking through the fluff. She wants to puke. Cold clammy noodles were forced down her throat to start wriggling in her, wanting to dump everything into a bin.

Hugging herself, Ellen's gaze lands on the bracelet in front of her.

No. No, she didn't die. She… she came into the attic, she looked through one of the boxes, and picked up that bracelet. Ellen steadies her breathing. Someone put her under a heat lamp. Her head aches. Headaches. There's a high-pressure hose in her head.

'Ow…' Ellen mumbles. She palms her forehead. It's warm. That's okay, right? It's only bad when it's boiling your fingers off.

Far below, someone rattles the ladder with their footsteps.

'Ellen?' Mom calls. 'Is everything alright?'

'Yes, everything's fine!' Ellen squeaks. 'Just tripped over.'

'You have school in half an hour,' Mom cautions. She starts to walk away, her voice growing fainter as she does. 'You don't want to be late on the last day.'

Her breath catches in her throat like a baseball half slipping from the catcher's hand. It ends up slipping anyway, bouncing into the dirt and the grass. It turns unpleasantly damp and the crowd cries out in their disappointment. The runner slides into the plate, throwing her arms up in triumph. Ellen picks up her breath again. Last day of school. That feels like a lifetime ago.

Okay, step backwards a bit, kid. She's Ellen. She's sixteen– no, twenty– double no. Nine. Ten. She's ten years old. She runs a hand down her face. Still hot. She wonders what it's like to have tea, does a kettle have the same warmth to it or is there enough insulation? Ellen is ten years old. The last day before summer vacation is today, in half an hour. At least, that's when she'll start leaving since technically she'd already be at school if it began in half an hour. She's in third grade, soon to be progressing into fourth grade. In the transition, she's going on a road trip with her extended family.

Ellen huffs in annoyance. That is really, _really_ not helpful. She needs to focus on who she is, not leave Mom and go on an adventure around America with her bro– no, not brother. She doesn't have a brother. She has a Mom and her Grandpas and uncles and aunts and cousins and–

And… there aren't anyone else.

Everyone has parents, but Ellen can't think of any extras, not even one attached to a "brother."

Despite herself Ellen is relieved. She doesn't have two families bumping around like soggy cereal. She has her family, and she doesn't have an entire extra foreign set. She has the uncanny sense of having a brother, except she doesn't, but at least her death isn't swarming her completely. Her death? No, no she didn't die. Ellen is here. She plants a hand on her chest to check. Yes, her heart's knocking away. Her limbs are gobbled jelly and her skin's a frog's, but she is not dead. But she did die. She felt herself die. She felt her neck give way and snap like a candy cane.

That's not what just happened.

No, no, no. Ellen is a ten-year-old girl, a ten-year-old girl who is sitting in an attic. She… Mom said she had a lot of old things and Ellen wanted to take a look. There's a time crunch. But, Ellen wanted to look through it before being swept away for the next few months.

And then, she'd picked _that_ up, and died.

Ellen hugs the pillow to her chest. Her knees dig into her hands from how hard she clutches herself. It's a super old pillow. There's pretty golden patterns on it, really faded, but it looks like elephants and horses. The bracelet doesn't look like the pillow. It's old. Both are old. The bracelet's made of a lot of beads, fruit looping around in a halo of cold. Red and gold and orange, bright colours, and not a hint of grey clouds are there. Ellen doesn't want to go closer.

Past it, past the immovable bonfire of a bracelet, is the ladder.

The way down is on the other side. Ellen has half an hour to gather the courage.

How long has it been since she touched it? Ellen can't tell. If a lifetime were a jigsaw, someone decided to stuff a box into her ears. Her head throbs with it. Elephants and horses are dancing in her mind, and by weight or hard hoof it hurts.

Ellen hugs the pillow tighter for a moment, just a moment. She gently uncurls. The pillow goes back on top of the box.

'I'm Ellen,' she whispers into the dust ridden air. '_Ellen_. I'm not dead.'

She picks up the bracelet and flinches.

It's surprising how tight the walls turn, when Ellen's afraid. The roof isn't tall. Sam always needs to duck when he's here– no not Sam, Mom. When Mom is here, she needs to duck. The boxes make imaginary barrier warriors, ready to take up arms and pin her to the ground and make sure she dies.

The bracelet hasn't killed her.

Ellen's still breathing.

It's a pretty bracelet. That's why Ellen picked it up in the first place. It's pretty. It matches Ellen's shirt, kinda, with yellow fabric being cousins in the warm colour family tree. The beads are cold under her fingers. They warm up quickly as Ellen holds them, like how her jacket zipper does. It's too warm now, for jackets, but it's a really nice puffer jacket. She'll wear it in autumn. It's in the wrong family of colours for the bracelet. It's blue. Don't opposing colours sorta match each other, though? Ellen supposes they must be a marriage of colours rather than a family, then. But the beads are still cold, for now.

Good. Good, good, great, that's good. The bracelet is not going to do that again. Unless it is. It's pretty still and pretty harmless looking. Ellen bites her lip.

She doesn't have time to try figure it out. There might be something in the other boxes but she only has half an hour, no, less now. There might be something in there that would explain the death bracelet, or even other death bracelets.

There could be a mental death armoury!

And somehow that mental death armoury wasn't noticed by anyone else in the family. Not Ellen's Mom, or Dad, or anyone that owned it, nobody ever came out of the attic screaming. That makes sense. _Not_, Ellen adds scornfully.

'Ellen, are your bags packed for Grandpa?'

The call's startlingly loud. 'Um, ah, yes? I'll check!' Ellen says. She scrambles forward to the edge of the ladder.

She can think about it later.

Five minutes into the drive to school, Ellen puts her hand in her pocket. The beads are warming up. Her vision doesn't fracture into alien thoughts and feelings. That's… good, that is good.

How in the world is she going to focus on her holiday?

* * *

Throughout her day Ellen is a burning bundle of nerve ends and unnerved ends. Can nerves be unnerved? She's pretty sure they can be. That's what she is: raw, unnerved nerves planting into sand, grit digging in.

The second the bell rings Ellen gets up and goes for the door. School presses and like water bursting from pipes the flood of fellows flee the facilities. Ellen hops the side of the stairs, under the bars and out of the way, and makes her way to the car park.

Where's Thia– _Gwen_, where is _Gwen_. Ellen searches for a hint of blue among the blur of shirts and motion. It looks like she's first. Before she can second guess herself Ellen skips to the carpark and up a nearby tree.

She sighs in relief. One arm wraps around a branch the same size as that arm, the other lazily hangs loose. No bag to worry for, no school to worry about….

The bracelet pops into her mind again.

What to do?

It hadn't done anything during the day. Ellen had touched it a few times, always in a semi-public area that wouldn't be stumbled across immediately. If it actually, literally killed her, Ellen wants people to find her but if it just made her faint, well, that would be embarrassing. But it hasn't done anything.

Ellen puts her hand in her pocket. The beads twist under her fingers, not doing anything. Wind buffets the branch she's lying on.

'Ellen! _Ellen!_' a voice calls, more frustrated the second time.

There's Gwen. Ellen doesn't do anything. She has more important things to care about. Gwen's wandering the car park and, honestly, her cousin can take care of herself. Ellen may as well delay reuniting with the queen of prissy.

Ellen has two hypotheses.

Option one is that she died, then she remembered who she was in the attic after she touched the bracelet. The bracelet was in all those memories, after all. Maybe it reminded her of who she was and poof, there she was. Ellen doesn't think that's right. Those memories, while overwhelming, are like a shattered stone after many years being glued back together. All the cracks seem wrong.

Option two is that Ellen just… randomly got memories from someone with the same name as her who died.

That doesn't sound right either.

There's a pretty obvious reason why neither are likely.

Gwen crosses the car park, then abruptly looks up. She lets out a frustrated huff. 'There you are! What are you doing?!'

Ellen hurries to finish her thought. That reason why is, simply, people don't randomly get memories from bracelets. It's more likely she daydreamed, even if it didn't feel like it. That happens in stories, not real life, and it's frankly absurd that it even happened at all, Ellen concludes, then leans her head against the wood.

'Hanging out? What are you doing?' Ellen calls down.

'Looking for you!' Gwen sweeps her arm and points down the street. Her eyes don't leave Ellen as she glares. 'Grandpa's waiting for us and _you're _sitting up in a tree.'

Gwen pauses expectantly. Her other hand is on her hip and like she's made of wire, neither shift. Maybe she has clothes hangers instead of bones and Gwen's actually an invisible entity carefully puppeteering the body of a ginger green-eyed Tennyson. Ellen wouldn't put it past Gwen. She's rigid enough. Ellen frowns at her thoughts. That made zero sense, even when she runs through it again. She must've skipped some steps.

At Ellen not replying, Gwen groans. 'Did you really think that'll work? Get down. Grandpa's waiting, and he's not gonna let us go home because you're sitting in a tree.'

'I'm not sitting in a tree,' Ellen grumbles, 'I'm lying on it. The branch isn't flat enough–'

'Whatever, just get down.'

Ellen scowls, grabs the branch, and tries her best to land on Gwen. She dodges. Ellen lands and hides her annoyance. 'Your parents didn't convince Grandpa this was a bad idea?'

'Please. They're the ones who convinced _Grandpa_ to do this. Did your Mom?'

'Grandpa convinced _her_.'

With another huff, Gwen starts leading the way towards where Grandpa must be parked.

Ellen asks, 'And, Ben's still coming?'

Gwen throws Ellen an irritated glare. 'His boasting's why we're on this trip in the first place. What do you think?'

'He could've flunked fourth grade and had to take summer school.'

That knocks a smile onto Gwen. It must be a fun image. Ben, scruffy as always, flipping over a test sheet, only to find a sudden row of circled Fs, Fs, Fs that fly out of the page. They swirl around Ben, the classroom vanishing around him and leaving him in a purple and red fog of his failures. Last to go is his desk, then the floor, and he drops down into a jail cell. His outfit swirls from white with one stripe to many stripes, horizontal ones, and the cell slams shut.

It's a good thought.

Gwen shakes her head, the mood drying.

'As nice as that would be, I don't think you can flunk fourth grade.'

'Aw, really?'

'Why does it sound like you want to _try?_'

'Hey! I, unlike some people, _like_ school, thank you very much.' Ellen pauses after her words. It was almost like a habit to say that. What _some people?_ The only person that Ellen really knew who doesn't like school is Ben. Where had that come from?

It's that sly trickle of memory's fault. That makes an awful amount of sense.

'A-anyway, I did _not _try to fail. I'm not someone who does that,' Ellen says hastily.

'Riiiight,' Gwen drawls. 'There's the Rustbucket. Let's get this over with.'

That is a sentiment Ellen can wholeheartedly agree with. It's not that Ellen dislikes her family. She likes her family! Her family is great. Sometimes. But both her cousins in an enclosed space for months isn't the best idea even when Ellen isn't questioning herself.

The RV, also known as the Rustbucket for reasons Ellen doesn't know, is a pretty small space for four people. If cars were building blocks, the Rustbucket would be a brick on wheels covered in plaster. Cream paint peels at the bottom bits of metal. It makes the Rustbucket look way old, and it probably is super old! It's old enough that her uncles and Dad must have gone on their own trips inside it to infinity, beyond, and beyond the beyond.

What's "beyond the beyond," anyway? "Beyond" is probably space, right, so would _beyond_ that be more space or another level of space? Ultraspace! Megaspace! Space space space space space! Knowledge on space, that needs to be a top priority! After bracelet, that is. Maybe she should put space aside for now.

Speaking of space, the Rustbucket's in a temporary parking space. No wonder Gwen was so cross. They head over. Ellen's feet, at least, pick at the floor and grow heavier as she approaches.

As they pass the window Gwen taps on it. 'I found her,' she announces, then strides on and pulls open the door. Ellen hops inside after Gwen, hand catching at the door–

–potential, pride, warmth of family–

–_Of course!_ Rust-bucket! It's a bucket of bolts and rust.

Grandpa's so smart.

'Glad you could join us, Ellen,' Grandpa says warmly.

The Rustbucket's just like Ellen remembers, even with a long absence. Everything about it is warm. It fits the dry desert air they'll inevitably ride across and Ellen just _knows_ she'll wish everything is made of cool blues soon enough. Gwen has the right idea. Oranges and lemons, say the bells of saint Bellwood, and that is the permanent colour range. Orange to yellow. It would be nice to have a lemonade when they're out in the desert.

Ellen shuts the door behind her, absently shaking her hand. 'Hi, Grandpa. Is Ben coming?'

'He is,' Grandpa confirms. Gwen, sat at one of the window seats, irritably lets her head slump into the window. 'We're heading to pick him up now.'

...Fun.

Ellen claims the backwards seat. She props her chin on her hand. A bit of vertigo swims as the Rustbucket rumbles, then as the world peels away from Ellen outside. Forget lemonade, now she _really_ wants an orange. Did she drink anything at all today? Ellen worries at her lip. It feels dry. No, she didn't drink anything today. An orange would be great.

Outside the window there are no oranges. Trees spot the side of the road, whipping into Ellen's sight and then slowly shrinking as Ellen watches. Briefly, Ellen expects a gloomy sky and a grey tone. That's silly. Gloomy skies are exceptions, not norms, but Ellen expected it anyway. As with everything else, Ellen decides to blame the bracelet. It's very blameable. Considering it made her think she died, it deserves being blamed. None of the trees are orange trees. Most are brown, in fact. Houses pop by and pop by and pop by, one after the other in different shapes, sizes, and standing of riches.

'So…' Gwen says. Ellen starts, then glances her way. Gwen's shifted to leaning her chin on her hand, and Ellen quickly picks her head up and lays her arm on the table between them. Gwen absently stares out the window, her eyes occasionally flicking to Ellen. 'How was school?' she says. The way she phrases it is like she's speaking from obligation, like she couldn't think of another sentence to say.

'Good,' Ellen says. She shrugs her shoulders. 'School,' she adds, like that encompasses everything an answer can give.

Clearly, school isn't why Gwen started the conversation. Ellen's proven right as Gwen sighs and says, 'If Ben puts up a big enough stink, do you think we can go home?'

'Ben doesn't know?'

'No. He doesn't.'

'That's not good.'

'Cover your ears when he gets here so his dweebish tantrum doesn't make your brain melt.' A sly smile crosses Gwen's face. 'Then again, you're already halfway there.'

Ouch. Something in Ellen withers a bit. She pastes on a smile. 'At least I'm halfway unmelted. I don't think Ben has any more sway over all this than we do.'

'I can dream, can't I?'

The Rustbucket starts to slow and the trees look familiar. Math and statistics say that means they must be there. Where's there? Ben's school? When in the world did Ellen ever go to Ben's sc– oh, right, family get together for Ben and Gwen's shared birthday a few years back, they'd borrowed the field afterwards for a water gun war because the two were–

Ellen mentally halts.

Why is Ben hanging by his pants in a tree?

Grandpa has to step out of the RV to get him down, along with another boy trapped alongside Ben. They'd been hit by a freak tornado. Clearly. They'd been strolling from Madison Elementary. The hour was dimming. The streets were quiet. A rumble crested the buildings, with both looking up in confusion. Then, crash! Bang! Their arms were caught by the hands of wind. Naturally, screams ensued. The wind didn't like that and unceremoniously dumped their catch into the trees, to wait for rescue.

Or, someone just hung Ben there, with their hands.

Tornados sound cooler.

With a clatter and a clamber Grandpa steps back into the RV, Ben quick on his heels. Ellen tries to catch Grandpa's eye as he passes. She isn't sure what she wants to convey. Pleading? Pleading sounds good. But instead, Ben pops into Ellen's view.

'I've so been looking forward to–'

That's when Ben locks eyes on Ellen. He stares, then spots Gwen as well. His sentence dies in his throat like a wet tarp smothering a campfire. Ellen is unwillingly sympathetic. Then she remembers how his boasting is why Gwen and Ellen are there at all, and the sympathy poofs away.

'What are you doing here?' Ben demands, gaze darting between them both. He throws to Grandpa, 'What are _they_ doing here!'

Behind Ben's head Gwen scowls. She shares with Ellen a look of aching irritation and foreboding frustration. 'Take it easy, dweeb, this wasn't our idea.' Gwen then adds in a lofty tone, 'Someone convinced my mom that going camping for the summer would be a _good experience_ for me.'

Like a gong sounded Ben's eyes turn wide.

'Grandpa, please, tell me you didn't…?' he starts to say.

Ellen finds her lip between her teeth again. It takes effort to stop worrying. Gwen was right. Ben didn't know. Whose idea was it to spring it on him last minute? Then again, Ellen only found out for sure a week ago after weeks of whispers. But as expected, Grandpa doesn't back down.

'I thought it would be fun if your cousins came along with us this summer.' Grandpa's eyebrows turn into storm clouds. 'Is that a problem?'

Ben seems speechless. His eyes dart to Gwen, to Ellen, then he sags and makes his way to the front seat. Summer's going well for all of the hour it had been.

The RV kicks into life. Can a car kick anything? That would be an interesting sport. Cars playing soccer, or basketball, that would take a lot of thought and skill and… thinking about it, not so fun to watch. Cars aren't the most dexterous things. The RV pulls away from the sidewalk again. They're on their way.

Ellen settles by the window. Grandpa called that he wanted to be at the campgrounds by sundown, didn't he? Ellen stifles a groan. They'd be sitting upwards of three hours? That's great. Good good great great. What to–

Ellen sits bolt upright and scans the back couches. Yes, there's her bag.

'I have a pack of cards?' Ellen suggests to Gwen. 'We could–'

'Not interested,' Gwen says flatly.

Just like that Ellen's sentence is slaughtered. A poor farmer wakes to a field of phrases and finds one, its breathing laboured, and in great sorrow puts it down. 'Oh. Okay, then.'

So much for that idea. It's going to be a long few hours.

* * *

'Alright, pit stop.'

Grandpa's call cuts through the RV, passing by Ellen and heading outside. Ellen grunts and picks her head off the window. When did the Rustbucket stop rumbling? Across the table Gwen smirks. Ellen quickly checks her face. It doesn't feel off–

Of course. Ellen checks her face via the _window_.

'_Ben_,' Ellen grumbles. She licks her thumb and tries to rub away the marker swirls on her cheek.

Something smacks into Ellen's elbow, bouncing, then clattering to the table and rolling. Ellen swats it like a fly. It's a marker.

'There,' Gwen says. She thumbs towards the back of the RV. 'Good luck getting revenge. Oh, and you're sleeping on the floor.'

The horror from that proclamation could distort a cup into half emptiness. There are three official beds in the RV. The table where Ellen and Gwen are sitting can drop down, letting Grandpa pin the larger bed into place. That's his. Then there is the back couch, which doubles as the storage for all their clothes and their things. Above that is the hanging bunk bed, which Ellen spies Ben sleeping in. That can be taken down when it isn't being used.

By "the floor," Gwen means Ellen gets to sleep on a mattress. The mattress is on the _floor_.

'How long was I asleep?' Ellen says incredulously.

'Uh, two hours?' Gwen slips out of her seat. 'I'm getting a megagulp,' she tosses over her shoulder.

'Ooo, can you get me one?' Ellen requests. 'I'll draw your cat onto Ben if you do?'

Gwen sniggers. 'Deal,' she says. The RV door shuts behind her.

With that, Ellen grabs the marker. She flashes a grin towards the back of the RV, where Ben sleeps, unaware of his oncoming doom.

'Alright, dorkbrain,' Ellen says, uncapping the marker, 'let's see how you like it.'

Ben was playing on easy mode. Everyone knows that Ellen's a heavy sleeper and that it's borderline cheating to draw on her face. The patterns on the floor are land mines that Ellen has to step around. Her shoes were already off, letting her tread be light.

Target acquired: one Benjamin Tennyson. Ellen cannot make a single sound. Anything could give away her position.

That in mind, Ellen slides open the bathroom door as she passes. Ben doesn't so much as twitch. Good good good. She leaves it open and approaches the edge of the bed.

Begin the heist. Step one, kitty mark. Ellen winds one hand around the bed support and hauls herself upward. It's a bit difficult to balance with one hand. The other hesitates over Ben's face. Why stop at just replicating the symbol on Gwen's shirt? Why not make Ben _become_ the mark? If Ellen could see a mirror, she hopes she could describe her expression as "fiendish." She isn't too sure what a fiend is, but they sound super cool and super good at sneaking.

Eyes, ears, mouth, nose, whiskers, and two of the symbols themselves. Ellen gives the oblivious Ben another grin, steps off of the couch, and slips into the bathroom.

'Ugh, Ben,' Ellen grumbles. Ben had gone all out. Ellen rubs off as much as she can see in the mirror. This'll teach her to sleep–

Someone hurls a shot put into Ellen's stomach.

Ellen's sleeping on the mattress. She's sleeping _on the mattress!_

Outside, motorbikes roar.

If Ellen's on the mattress, then Ben can draw on her anytime! All the time! There's nowhere where Ellen is safe. On the bunks Ellen might've managed to roll and keep her head facing the wall, and ensured her fortress of her face couldn't be stormed by Ben's knights of writing, but on the floor? Ellen is doomed.

And Gwen _knew_. That's why Gwen gave Ellen the marker! She _knew_ that neither one would be safe! Ellen can get Ben whenever, Ben can get Ellen whenever. It's a cycle. A "bye-bye Gwen having to worry about her cousin's" cycle. Gwen merrily gets to saunter away while Ellen and Ben dog fight on the beaches.

It's a cycle that Ellen fell for.

Ellen taps the marker against her mouth, thinking hard, or hardly thinking. Right. All Ellen has to do is not retaliate. When she wakes up tomorrow and has marker on her face, Ellen must not retaliate. She _must not retaliate_.

What are the chances that, in the face of no retaliation, that Ben keeps doing it? Ellen internally groans. If Ben succeeds, then doesn't have an answering shot… there's nothing to stop Ben from doing it again and again. Ellen has to hand it to Gwen. Good plan. The second Ellen drew on Ben, she was doomed. Until she can break the cycle, doomed is what she will be.

She can hear shouting and… police sirens, for some reason. The RV door opens with a bang, rattling the toothbrushes on the bathroom shelves. Ellen winces and pokes her head out of the bathroom. Ben, mercifully, is still asleep.

Ellen pockets the marker and heads for her seat. Her cheeks feel raw. 'What's–?'

'Someone tried to rob the gas station!' Gwen says. She doesn't have any drinks! Ellen glowers at her empty hands. Ellen fell for Gwen's trap, and Gwen didn't even uphold her promise? Oh, and robbing places is bad, yes, but _drink_.

'What?'

'Sit down, kids,' Grandpa says.

They are seated for barely a second when Grandpa tears out of parking and onto the road. The sharp turn throws Ellen to one side and she has to scramble to sit down properly.

'Someone tried to steal things?' Ellen checks, once seated.

'Not one someone. These two guys in these masks, they ran out of the store with bags of money. Seriously stereotypical of them. They knocked the drinks out of my hands and ran for these motorbikes, and they _almost_ got away when Grandpa stopped them!'

Gwen leans forward to address Grandpa.

'That was amazing, back there,' Gwen says.

The RV slows to a more ordinary pace. Grandpa chuckles. 'Naw, just doing my part to keep my grandkids safe. Stopping two no-good thieves was just a bonus.'

'What happened?'

Ellen winces. And here begins the cycle of doom, with Ben waking up.

Gwen says, turning, 'Grandpa stopped some th–' and then she can't speak due to laughter. Ben had hopped down from the bed. The whiskers Ellen drew are on full display, twisting in Ben's own confusion. Even if it's leading to Ellen becoming a permanent canvas it must be one of Ellen's better attempts. Despite herself, Ellen starts to grin.

'What?' Ben says grumpily. It hits him almost immediately. 'Argh, which of you dweebs did it?!'

Before Ellen can seize the opportunity to break the cycle, Gwen points at Ellen. In for a penny, in for a pound.

'I think it's a purr-fect improvement,' Ellen says. She flips the marker across her knuckles and sends Ben a smile.

Ben, halfway through scrubbing his face, shoots Ellen a glare. 'You better watch your back,' he grumbles, and heads for the bathroom.

* * *

The campground is as quiet and empty as the hours after a garden party.

'It's beautiful, Grandpa.'

Ellen must agree with Gwen. The grass is short, but smooth like a bed of feathers. Each light curve captures the fading sunshine. The field is empty, too. Didn't Grandpa want to get here early? No, no, he wanted to be here before nightfall. It's before nightfall. The sun is purpling the sky, gone from sight, and the moon is dominating the horizons. It's the minimum time before nightfall.

'Ha, I knew you'd like it,' Grandpa says to Gwen. 'I'll get started on dinner.'

With that gentle announcement, Ellen finds herself shooed outside along with her cousins. Ben's cleared the marker from his face and his expression heralds Ellen as marked for doom. The marker itself burns in Ellen's pocket. Not literally, of course. A literal burn would mean Ellen would rapidly lack trousers. She isn't a fan of, of, exposure? It's something about exposure. She can't remember what the words are off the top of her head.

More importantly, _trees_.

'Grandpa does have good taste in camping spots,' Gwen says. Her tone thrums with unsaid disdain. _Grandpa_ has good taste, unlike everyone else here, is what her tones says.

'Uh huh,' Ellen says absently. The nearest tree doesn't have low branches, but the _next _tree does. Ellen pats Gwen's shoulder in distraction and starts towards it. 'I'm going up there.'

'Oh, sure! Ditch everyone to break your neck!' Gwen calls after Ellen.

Ellen is positive Gwen kept talking, and Ben starts needling her as well, but Ellen tunes both out. The first branch is a little higher than Ellen's reach, but with a jump and bark to her stomach, Ellen pulls her way up. She doesn't stop climbing until she's at least on a branch four metres up.

Once in the air, Ellen lets out a relieved sigh.

She scoots backwards. The trunk is wonderfully straight, so Ellen leans her back against it. She sits like she's riding a pony. What's riding a pony like? It can't be too comfortable, since it's a living creature, and its muscles and bones must be all pokey. That must be why saddles exist. Branches are more comfortable. At least, Ellen assumes so.

Gwen's lounging on the picnic table. Her face looks pinched, frustrated, and scrunched. Ben's pacing around the table, arms waving in animated annoyance.

Ellen grins. It's easy to imagine voices to the sight.

Ben says, _grr, I'm a shouty angry person and I'm really mad._

Gwen says, _I'm mad too, but I'm going to be posh about it_.

Ben says, _shut up I totally have a better reason to be mad. People are here, I don't like that, and I'm going to blame them even though they had nothing to do with it and hate it just as much._

Gwen says, _yeah well I'm a criminal mastermind. Bwah ha ha._

The reminder chills Ellen's glee. Ellen drops her head to the bark behind her and her fingers paw into her pocket. The marker's still there, of course. She has to think of something, anything, that'll stop the cycle before it starts. Gwen's cycle. Ellen can't try and stay awake all night. While that would be the easiest way to prevent retaliation, it isn't one Ellen would be good at.

Ellen stays in her tree. She only climbs down when called for dinner and she quickly retreats back to the air once she's done. If it were up to Ellen she'd stay there for the entire night. She'd stay in the air, in the breeze, where she can watch the stars mingle with the clouds and faintly make out birds settling in for the night.

It's not. It's not up to Ellen.

A shooting star dips its way across the sky. Make a wish, Ellen. She wishes she never touched the bracelet, to start with. If that's too difficult she'll take some fluke to let them all go home.

'Ellen,' Grandpa calls up to her. 'Why don't you come down and help me with the tents?'

Ellen flinches in surprise. When did he get to the bottom of Ellen's tree? Last she saw, he was hovering over the pair sat in stubborn opposites. The clearing's deserted of cousins, bickering and all. A dull boom of an unseen firework rolls by.

'Where's the twins?'

'They're on a nature walk together,' Grandpa says. He looks pleased. Ellen is almost certain that whatever walk the pair are on it isn't being done willingly. And they're _together_. That can only end with a shower of happy rainbow flowers and a chocolate sundae. Grandpa says, 'If you like, you can go join them.'

That… does not sound fun. It's rare, the times when they can get along with one another. In almost all of them Ken is around to mediate between Ben and Gwen. Ellen is not a good mediator. She's more likely to immediately meander towards a pit and a trap constructed from the musings of one of them, and then end up soaked to her skin. Or act in kind.

Trees are safe. Ellen is the best at them. 'Can't I stay up here?'

With a chuckle, Grandpa shakes his head. 'That's not an option today, Ellen. It's spending quality time walking with your cousins, or with me pitching tents.'

The most important word in that sentence is the word "today." It is _not_ day, it is night or late evening! Therefore, Ellen is absolutely able to stay in her tree!

Ellen climbs down.

Well, tomorrow still counts as not being part of "today." She can climb back up tomorrow.

Maybe it'll be a tree whose branches let her climb even higher! It'll be high enough that even the smallest gust of wind will send her swaying and tumbling through the air, whose cool breaths play with her hair and let it become a shower behind her head… but it's far more likely to swat Ellen in the face with blonde. That's usually how it goes. _That_ is why she's packed hair ties, and a jacket for the cold.

At least, Ellen thinks she packed it. She packed her bags last night. ...It feels like a lifetime removed, since a certain bracelet rammed a bleating battering ram into her head.

Grandpa passes Ellen a mallet and they start ticking the pegs into place.

What memories did she get, anyway? Who were those people? Ellen. In those memories she was called Ellen. Was that because Ellen's name is Ellen, or was that Ellen also originally called Ellen? Ellen's head feels like it's starting to spin. She, or rather the other Ellen, had a brother named Sam, who got married to someone named… Pythia? And that Ellen hadn't liked Pythia at first but then suddenly was all for being best buddies with Pythia for some reason.

The more Ellen pokes the memories, the more it feels like there are gaping holes between each. There's a garbled quality to them. Thoughts bubble between the empty spaces that hint, barely, of things Ellen knows that she knew when she was _in_ the memory, but the Ellen in that memory didn't think of clearly enough for Ellen to remember. It's like the logic of a dream. There's a castle with a dragon in it, and Ellen knows it'll let her through if Ellen sings it a song, but when she wakes up Ellen doesn't know why she knew that or even why she believed it, let alone what the song was. It doesn't help how the memories bounce around out of order like a disorganised parade.

Ellen's nose wrinkles. If a magical bracelet was going to drop memories into her head, it could have the decency to make them make sense. It also could stop making her head play on the mini roundabout. Ellen would like to get off this ride, please.

'Aw, would you look at that,' Grandpa says disapprovingly. Ellen immediately checks over her tent. She isn't doing that badly, is she? But when she glances at Grandpa he's looking over the treeline.

A faint plume of smoke coils into the sky. Heat and light beckon at its underside, calling for the particles to fall back down, but they stay thick and black and rising until, inevitably, they fade into the night sky and the stars.

'What is it?' Ellen asks.

'It looks like the start of a forest fire.' Grandpa's sigh feels irritated. 'Probably some darn fool of a camper messing around with things they shouldn't.'

Poor trees. They don't deserve to be hurt just because someone made a mistake. It looks thick enough that anyone nearby will clear out soon enough. The rangers are sure to notice it, too. But by the time they get the fire under control, a lot of it will be cinders and ash.

Wait.

Wait a minute.

Ellen drops her mallet. She whirls to face Grandpa, just as he says in a voice of dawning horror, 'They're not back yet.'

He bursts into a flurry of motion. One second he's at the tent, the next near the RV. Ellen scrambles to her feet and follows him. She's just in time to get a fire extinguisher to the chest.

'Better take this,' Grandpa says.

He easily holds the other like it's a coffee mug. Not a drop spills nor does it throw off Grandpa's direct stride towards the forest. That's good. Ellen hugs hers to her chest. It's almost as big as her chest. She scrambles to find the handle and scrambles to follow Grandpa, altogether ending up as scrambled eggs. Ellen's yellow enough for that.

Grandpa leads the way through the woods, through a narrow winding path. It quickly fades into the scattering of trees and clear spaces. As Ellen jogs after Grandpa the clear spaces seem wrong. They're too big. There's not enough ground cover. There should be bushes and ferns and bipolar skies and ramshackle bushwalk signs. Ellen blinks. The moment passes. She can hear fire crawling its way up the meals of trees.

And then there is fire.

It's like an ocean bathed in sunset. Blazing light glints from rippling points, catching on piles and then throwing themselves to the next crumbling edge. Heat hits Ellen like the smell of the ocean, but that's not sea spray. It's smoke. Foul and thick, but Ellen didn't even see it. She's in it. Like a fog it's invisible save for the blurring of the distance. Fire laughs like fish, flinging out of the uniform ground's orange waters and launching from tree to tree to tree.

In the air there's more fish. Ash. Shimmering air. Invisible fish with gleaming scales swimming back and forth but too quickly for Ellen to see. All of it's blackened and shrivelled. Ellen's never been to the sea, not one like this, never like a storm. A forest shouldn't scream like this. Good, this is just great. This is great. Great. This is wrong.

'Grandpa…?' Ellen says hesitantly.

'I know,' Grandpa says. What he knows, Ellen doesn't. 'Stay close to me and listen carefully.'

With a sweep of his fire extinguisher, Grandpa kills the nearest fish. Fire. It's bathed in froth and returns to its natural state, suffocating on the beach. Good.

Ellen mirrors Grandpa. There's an invisible rope between her and the path they'd come down. She keeps looking over her shoulder and expecting to see it burning away. It'll go up in smoke. Poof. No more Ellen. It'll be slower than snapping her ne–

'–_to the whole forest!_'

'_Oh yeah? You're the one_–'

'Grandpa!' Ellen says. She darts forward, towards the garbled shout. 'I heard Gwen! Gwen! Gwen, where are you!'

'Wait, Ellen–!'

'–_so__ busted for this_–'

Fire roars beside Ellen, swatted away in a burst of foam. Trees. Trees. Trees. Trees and fire fill all Ellen sees, and maybe she should've waited for Grandpa.

Heat curls around her ankles. A twig, warm and dry, scratches at her as she passes, but it's not on fire so it's all good, it's all fine.

Ellen just needs to find her cousins and everything will be okay.

Everything's fine, everything's good, everything's gr–

There is a man made of fire in front of her.

Ellen shrieks, grabs the fire extinguisher, and drenches him in foam.

He splutters. He had his back to Ellen, but quickly turns around at Ellen drenching him and maybe she shouldn't have done that. He's made of heat, of magma drawn into a humanoid form, and in scant moments the fire flares back into a bonfire. He spits out some foam. 'Hey!' he growls. 'I know I look weird, but–'

'What did you do to my cousins!' Ellen says. She's surrounded by fire. This guy, he started it, didn't he? He started the fire. Gwen was here, Ellen _knows_ that for sure, but where is she and what did he do?! 'A-answer me.'

'I'm right here,' Gwen drawls.

What?

Ellen doesn't take her eyes off the glowering human candle. Sidestep. Oh, there's Gwen. She's standing right behind the monster, her hands on her hips. Head, shoulders, stomach, knees, toes, there's no burns. Good. That can change alarmingly fast. Great.

'You… what's going on?' Ellen says. She notices her extinguisher aim had dropped, and quickly forces her arms to aim upward again. Why are these so _heavy_. Because they've got a lot of compressed extinguisher stuff in them which is very dense and useful. Right. More importantly, where's Ben. 'What happened!'

The extinguisher jerks to one side and Ellen has to stagger to keep her grip. Fire guy swatted the hose! 'Don't even think about it, dweeb,' he says.

'Oh, please, _you're_ the dweeb,' Gwen says snobbishly. 'Which of us set fire to the forest, again?'

Fire guy rounds on Gwen. 'That never would've happened if _you_ hadn't messed with those watches is the first place!'

'Says the one who decided to juggle fireballs!'

'Wait, wait, wait, what's going on?' Ellen points the hose at fire guy again, this time more to point at him without dropping it than to aim froth and hopeful unpleasantries at him. 'That's _Ben?!_'

'Welcome to the party, doofus,' Gwen says.

Footsteps, heavyset and with some degree of speed, sound nearby. What took Grandpa so long? Also: why is Ben a third degree burn victim and still capable of locomotion? The latter question seems waaay more important as of right here and now.

'Kids, are you…' Grandpa trails off the closer he comes. When his sentence resumes it's stuttery and bewildered. '...What in blazes?'

'_Literally_,' Gwen says. 'Ben grabbed a space watch and it turned him into a freak!'

'I grabbed it?! You grabbed it!'

'Did not!'

'Did too!'

Slow down, slow down, slow down! 'What did you grab?'

A hand lands on Ellen's shoulder. It's Grandpa's. 'Hold on, all of you. We can talk about who did what later. Right now, we have a forest fire to deal with.'

The living guy fawkes scarecrow who's Ben, apparently, that's a thing, his eyes widen.

'Aw, man, what do we do?' he says.

Ellen hoists up her fire extinguisher. 'We have these?'

'Two fire extinguishers can't stop an entire forest fire,' Gwen says. The words sound like Gwen meant it to be mocking and dripping with contempt, but the fire burnt the tone all away.

Strictly speaking, Gwen's right, fire extinguishers can't put out a full-on bonfire, but they can clear a path out of the heat and free as a bird. But if Ben caused the fire, it's their responsibility to fix it. Ellen gulps. The flames lick at the trees surrounding them. The invisible rope is well and truly cinders because Ellen has no idea where to run.

It's Grandpa who has an idea first. 'Backfire,' he says. He gestures to the flames. 'Start a new fire and let it burn into the old fire. They'll snuff each other out. Think you can do it, Ben?'

Ben agrees, and Grandpa quickly ushers Ellen and Gwen away. Ellen hears Ben racing in the opposite direction. He's on fire, he'll be fine. Grandpa clearly hadn't lost the rope leading back, because by following his lead Ellen soon steps out into where the forest had yet to burn, and then the clearing with the Rustbucket.

Ellen half bows over, supporting herself by her knees, carefully letting the fire extinguisher lean against her leg.

Everything feels raw, yet cold. Her lungs feel stretched and like there are little pinches in them, which fade as Ellen catches her breath. That's strange. They hadn't even run when leaving. Adrenaline, must be, adrenaline makes everyone's head spin when it's done.

'Gwen, Ellen, are you both alright?' Grandpa asks.

'Fine!' Gwen says, 'Ben stapled a freaky space watch to my wrist, but other than that I'm perfectly angelic.'

'I'm okay, too,' Ellen says. She glances up and down her arms, her legs. Nothing feels burnt or disturbingly numb.

Above the trees the smoke looks like it's dying down. That, or Ellen's eyes are playing tricks on her. One or the other. The other direction is Gwen, who does have a watch on her wrist. It's in blues, matching her clothes, with various pink highlights around it.

Ellen's successfully caught her breath, so she waves vaguely in Gwen's direction. 'What were you saying about that watch?'

* * *

By the time Ben graces them with his presence, Gwen's outlined the whole sordid tale with a myriad of gestures and insults. Ben catches the tail end of it, so he naturally decides to start correcting Gwen's story. Both Ellen's cousins end up in one another's faces, with Gwen stood on top of a log to properly shout in Ben's flame filled frame.

From what Ellen could gather, a thing had fallen from the sky and nearly hit the pair of them. One of them had fallen into the pit it dug, with both claiming it was the other one, and the thing had opened itself up. Then, the watches had pounced on them.

'No, _you_ reached in and tried to grab it!' Gwen says. She points at her watch for emphasis. 'I tried to stop you, and then the watches jumped on us!'

'You said that if we went to get Grandpa the watches would disappear before we got back. This is _your_ fault!'

'I never said that, you said that!'

Ellen perches her chin on her hand and idly swings her marshmallow back into the fire. Ben kindly provides the flames. The flames of an argument are far more unwelcome.

Now that Ben's outside of the fireplace named "the forest is burning we're all going to die," it's much easier to see what he's been turned into. He's essentially the Human Torch. Plates of reddish, rocky material sit like tectonic plates, complete with magma gleaming through the cracks. The rocks grow smaller at the edges of his limbs, thickening further away, and his head is topped with flickering flames. There's one thing that doesn't fit the colour pallet of orange and red, and that's the round metallic looking disk on his chest, offset. It's grey and white. It has an hourglass symbol on it, which looks the same as the one on the face of Gwen's watch. Except, you know, his one is white while Gwen's is pink and attached to a watch. His is in his chest. How'd it get there? Did a tree mallet it in?

Ellen swings the marshmallow into the fire again. Ben notices this time and swats at the branch, thankfully not hard enough to knock it from Ellen's hand.

'Cut that out,' he calls up to Ellen.

She doesn't. She just leans forward further, not enough to tip her from her tree, but enough for the marshmallow to bake on Ben's fire hair. 'You set the forest on fire, the least you can do is stay still and be useful,' Ellen says.

'The last time I did that Gwen turned me into a fire monster, so, _no,_' Ben says deliberately.

'You're not a monster, you're an alien,' Grandpa says.

Ellen glances down towards Grandpa, who's in the process of gathering wood for a proper campfire. He's paused in the process to make the comment. Ben, on the other hand, looks just as freaky and monstrous as before.

Grandpa stutters for a second. 'You said the watch came from space, so, what else could he be? Anyway, you're saying the watches just jumped up on your wrists?'

'That about sums it up. Right, Ben?' Gwen says accusingly.

'It's not my fault!' Ben shoots back.

'It doesn't matter whose fault it is,' Grandpa says sternly. 'What matters is figuring out what they are.'

In Ellen's pocket, the bracelet feels heavier and heavier with every word. No way are they related, right? But it can't be a coincidence that a bracelet threw memories into her head, and now watches were locomoting on their own and turning cousins into barbeques. Or, it could be. Coincidences do happen, sometimes, and what happened to Ellen did happen several hours ago. It could be unrelated. Is it? Ellen has no idea, but she does have marshmallows to eat. They're sweet and burnt.

'And how to turn Ben back,' Ellen says. Stick empty, she pokes Ben in the head, who scowls. 'No offense meant, but if you get in the RV you might melt it before we get anywhere near the desert.'

'What if Gwen's watch turns me back?' Ben muses. Ellen has the privilege of seeing Gwen's eyes widen, then whip her watch behind her back. Ben says, 'Here, Gwen, gimmie your watch!'

'Oh no, no way, you are _not _messing around with mine.' Gwen practically prances to the other end of the log, avoiding Ben easily.

'_Gwen_, come on! You turned me into this!'

'Yeah, and you touching _mine's _gonna turn me into another alien freak!'

Ellen's stick is on fire. Whipping it through the air successfully extinguishes the flame. Unlike Ben, who when running after Gwen doesn't even dim.

Grandpa intervenes, stopping Gwen in her tracks with one hand, outstretching to Ben with the other. 'I don't want either of you fooling around with these until we know what they are,' Grandpa says, in a tone that rejects arguments and shuts down conversations.

That sounds like the end of that to Ellen, right up until the symbol on Ben's chest starts to blink.

Red light bursts out.

It's sharper than a torch to the eyeballs, with its only warning being a drooping and rhythmic yet sad buzz. Ellen has to drop her stick, cover her eyes, anything to block the painful light. A grunt escapes her. It's unbidden. And when Ellen peeks between her fingers, Ben is standing there at his normal height, clothes, and self.

He looks down at his hands. It's like Ben hasn't seen hands before. A laugh slips from him. 'I'm me again!' he cheers, showing off his hands.

Ellen forlornly looks to the pack of marshmallows. 'Aw, man. I liked having a portable campfire,' Ellen says. She waves the pack to Ben for emphasis. It looks like Ben doesn't even bother to notice, since he's grappling with a grey watch and staggering under the effort he's unleashing.

'Still can't get this thing off,' Ben says.

'No duh, Sherlock,' Gwen says sharply. She taps Ben's forehead, deliberately angling her wrist to hit him with her watch. The pair glare at one another.

Meanwhile, Grandpa leans down and coaxes the actual campfire into life. Knowing their current luck, it's guaranteed to suddenly break loose and go wild, swimming across the world and bathing it in orange. He nods once, satisfied, and when Grandpa straightens he has a torch in his hand.

'Then we'd better start figuring out how. I'll check out that crash site.' Stern eyes turn on each of them. 'You guys stay here until I get back.'

'Don't worry, Grandpa, I'll keep an eye on them,' Gwen says primly.

'Aren't I the only one who didn't poke an alien satellite between the eyes?' Ellen asks. She leans on the branch and grins down at Gwen. Strictly speaking, she poked something else, but Gwen doesn't need to know that.

Gwen folds her arms. She doesn't meet Ellen's gaze, and she speaks through gritted teeth. 'If _you_ were there, you would've grabbed it before the watch could even jump on you.'

'If I were there….' Ellen trails off. Her eyes dart to the side. Gwen does have a point. That's why Ellen has her own mess to deal with. 'Okay, fine, but you don't know that for sure.'

With an irritated huff, Gwen sets herself on the log.

The campfire is warm, inviting, and Ellen gives a longing stare to her tree. There's no fires in reach in the branches. If Ellen wants marshmallows, she has to leave. Ellen climbs down and joins her cousins around the campfire. All she needs is a nice long stick, and she's good to go.

Ben's wrestling with his watch, still. So's Gwen. She's a little more subtle.

'Didn't Grandpa say to leave them alone?' Ellen asks.

It's a funny picture, both of them freezing simultaneously. They're mirror images. It's even truer with their watches attached to opposite wrists; Ben his right, Gwen her left. Both watches match their respective owners too. Gwen's is decked out in blue with pink highlights, Ben's in greys with red highlights.

Ellen's stomach swoops. Her bracelet matches her. It's in yellows and oranges.

Gwen glances at Ben first and quickly drops her arm. 'Yeah, Ben,' she says sharply, 'leave it alone.'

'Come on. You can't tell me you aren't a little bit curious about what else these things can do?' Ben says.

'Not in the least!' Gwen says, even if it sounds like a lie. Her eyes slip from meeting Ellen and Ben's. 'Besides, Grandpa said not to touch them. So, we aren't touching them.'

That's fine by Ellen.

Ben on the other hand, scoffs. 'What, you think Grandpa's going to find an instruction manual out there? If it isn't burnt to a crisp, that is.'

'And whose fault is that?'

'Yours! You turned me into that alien!'

'Grandpa's sure to find something,' Ellen says. 'Besides, what if messing with them just turns you into something else? And this time, it doesn't turn you back after setting the forest on fire? Or you do something, and it turns you back before you can fix it?'

'Then I'd turn into fire guy and fix it. Duh.'

Ellen raises a hand, then pauses. Opens her mouth. Closes it.

Gwen, thankfully, picks up the slack. 'You'll just make things worse. Besides, I don't even think your one works anymore.' She reaches out and pulls Ben's watch away from his chest. 'See? It's all red.'

'So?' Ellen asks.

'It was green before,' Gwen says irritably. 'Hey, maybe it'll be shut down forever and you'll have a useless watch stuck on your wrist.'

Ben snatches it back and starts twisting the dial. 'No way. If it's stuck here and it doesn't _do_ anything, we have to find a way to get them off.'

Bleeps and buzzing murmurs under the crackle of the campfire. Ellen pulls another marshmallow from the fire and watches the flames roar around it. The surface bubbles and melts. Pink shifts to black, the flames burn the sugar and flicker to green at the edges. Ellen blows it out, piecemeal. By the time she's eating it Ben has made no progress on his watch.

The forest edge is empty of Grandpa, fire, and presumably the rangers combing the forest for what caused the fire. Ellen checks the stick. Empty. She sticks the base into the dirt and leans forward.

'What happened out there?' she asks.

'Uh, watches jumped on us and Gwen turned me into a freak?'

Before Gwen could jump in, Ellen waves her hand. 'No, I mean, when you changed the first time. What happened?'

Ben's mouth opens and Ellen can see the sarcasm building up in it. He pauses. His hand drops next to him, perches on the log as he leans on both his palms.

'It was freaky,' Ben says slowly. 'Like… there was all this green light, and then I was me, but I was also somebody else.'

Him, but other… there's a word for that. Something about personhood, where it's like you're looking at yourself from the other end of a tunnel, but you're still holding the reins. Like, you're a gamer and your _self_ is the video game character. De… something. Ellen can't recall the word but it's a decent word to be sure. Oh! Indecent exposure, that's what she was thinking of before. She is not a fan of indecent exposure. But even with that question settled Ellen can sympathise with Ben. Maybe she wasn't turned into a freaky alien fire guy, but she did have alien memories slip in her head. And by alien, Ellen means "other," "alterity," not extra-terrestrial.

'Was the fire your first clue?' Gwen grumbles. Ellen frowns. Gwen sounds curious, and not as dismissive as she's trying to be. 'Hold onto that feeling, dweeb, because you're never feeling it again.'

Ben's eyes drop to Gwen's wrist.

A crooked smile crosses Ben's features. 'I dunno. It's not fair if I can't _share it around_.'

As Ben spoke he lunges for Gwen's arm. Gwen instantly jerks backwards, but Ben is latched around her wrist and they both tumble to the ground, both yelping. Ellen takes cover behind her log. Her back thumps into the wood and, wow, the stars really do look wonderful when they're away from the town, they'll look amazing when they go to the desert. Ellen's looking forward to seeing the Milky Way, if there isn't any light pollution out there. Gwen snaps at Ben to get off. Clicks and buzzes and the scuff of shoes in dirt, grunts of effort, and finally–

–a burst of pink light flashes over Ellen's head.

'Did Ben win?' Ellen calls.

Ben cries out. A deep, bass-y roar covers the shout like a wet blanket.

'Ben won,' Ellen confirms.

Two heavy impacts rock the log. The stars above Ellen are broken by a wall of orange, and a gaping, angry maw of thick and wet black gums.

Ellen's mouth hangs open for a second. 'I stand corrected,' Ellen says, her voice a higher pitch. 'Gwen won.'

The hairy, gigantic ape-dog growls at Ellen. A wave of hot, damp air falls onto Ellen's face. Ellen wriggles away and sits up. She wipes the moisture off her face needlessly. Ugh, it smells like a sheep whose wool was drenched in a lake.

Waving away air from her nose, Ellen squints at Gwen's new form. She looks ticked off. Her posture reminds Ellen of an angry pit bull, even without squinty eyes to glare down at Ellen. Gwen's a good few heads taller than Ellen the way she is now. Stiff orange fur covers her pronograde body, and a blue bracer is clasped around her left shoulder, a grey and white hourglass symbol sat inside it.

Ben's on his feet, brushing plant debris from his pants. His nose wrinkles. 'You make an even freakier dog than a person,' he says, voice filled to the brim with mirth. 'Are those _gills?_ What's the point of gills on a dog?'

'It is an alien dog,' Ellen points out. Gwen's head turns to face Ellen, teeth bared, and Ellen quickly puts her hands up innocently. 'Just stating the facts!'

'Can't you talk?' Ben says. He walks right up to Gwen's nose. Gwen looks like she could swallow half of Ben in one gulp. 'Ha! Phew, what a relief! Peace and quiet for the rest of the trip. I could get used to this.'

Ellen starts to speak. 'Doesn't the watch–'

'Oh, right, only half quiet,' Ben moans. He flops down with his back to Ellen's log.

'But doesn't it–'

'Man, why couldn't _you_ have a watch that made it so you couldn't talk?' Ben says. 'Or, hey, think there might be one that can do that for me? Like, a giant spider, and I could web both your mouths shut!'

Ellen folds her arms and glares. '...Tomorrow, you're going on an adventure to find your toothbrush,' Ellen vows. 'Won't the watch turn her back soon?'

A burst of hot air hits Ellen's neck. She side steps away, giving Gwen an uneasy glance.

'Probably,' Ben says. He hooks his arms behind his head. 'But my job is done.'

The ground shakes under Gwen's footfalls. She practically bounces from behind Ellen to above Ben, a strangely curved frown on her massive jaws. Her mouth opens, Ben grimacing under the flood of warm air, and–

'Ah! Gwen, put me down!'

Ellen has to blink several times to understand what just happened. Gwen had grabbed Ben around the waist, hauled him into the air, and somehow managed to clear the entire clearing in one smooth bound.

Ben's hands swing and bop Gwen on what would've been the nose of the eyeless dog she is. She's already dropping Ben. He gently rolls along the ground. Gwen grins above him as he groans loudly, swiping at the thick drool soaking his shirt. Scowl set, Ben swipes up a long stick and swings at Gwen, but she dances backwards long before it reaches her.

From the looks of it, either the giant alien dog doesn't need eyes, or its eyes are just very tiny and are perfectly able to track everything Ben attempts.

The chase continues for a few minutes.

Ellen gives up watching and locates her bag of marshmallows again.

* * *

What breaks Ellen's concentration is a dull, roaring sound.

Ellen looks up from the fire to find herself alone. She scans the clearing but, as before, there's a grand total of absolute zero other people around her.

Was that an explosion? Did her cousins make something blow up?

'Oops,' Ellen mutters. She carefully closes her book and perches it on the edge of the log. Her ears strain. Nope, nothing. She picks herself up and cups her hands around her mouth. 'Ben? Gwen? Where'd you go?'

There's another low, dull sound, like a baseball bat to a pig on a meat hook, reverberating around the forest. Not quite a roar. Ellen whips around, a flash of light catching her attention, but it's gone before her gaze lands on it. Ellen swallows thickly. They better not be setting the forest on fire _again_.

Climbing trees is something Ellen is always happy to do, but it's just as fruitless as calling out. Olly olly oxenfree? Nothing. Fear tiptoes into Ellen's mind and quietly asks for a place to room for the night. It promises to be unobtrusive, but it's an agitating, nagging sensation that won't go away. Ellen nervously paces the clearing. She doesn't bother hiding her stares out into the darkness.

As she waits the word she was looking for pops into her head. Depersonalisation. It doesn't quite capture what Ben described, at least, from what Ellen could tell. Or maybe it did. Ellen doesn't carry a dictionary on her at all times, something that Ellen keeps wishing she did do. But depersonalisation, that was when thoughts and feelings suddenly didn't feel like they really belonged to who felt them. Detachment. Alien-ness internally. It fit with what the bracelet threw into Ellen. Ellen doesn't know if it fit Ben, or Gwen, now that Gwen had turned into a giant dog. Was she still the dog? It couldn't have been long since Gwen changed. Ellen swallows. Well, when they came back, Ellen can ask them. "Can." She isn't going to, but the possibility exists.

'Ellen?'

Ellen twists and startles. Grandpa voice came from nowhere at all. It takes Ellen a second to find him, striding out of the forest. He is wearing a Hawaiian shirt, how in the world did he even partially be sneaky? Sneakiness is Ellen's thing. Then again, she's distracted.

With a click his torch turns off. Grandpa looks stern, and he looks around the clearing. The empty clearing.

'Where's Ben and Gwen?' he says.

'Ha, right.' Ellen grins with nerves. 'That, well, I wasn't paying attention _when_ they went off, but–'

Ellen cuts herself off. Faintly, there are footsteps. Running footsteps. Ellen could sing with relief. On cue the pair tumble out of the forest and bow over in puffed, panicked breaths. When they look up in unison Ellen checks Grandpa's expression. Stern, disapproving, and generically unhappy.

'Oh,' Ben says.

'"Oh" is right,' Grandpa says. 'Why don't we have a chat in the RV.'

His tone doesn't give even the smallest chance of it being ambiguous. Ellen immediately follows Grandpa. Even if Ellen isn't the one in trouble she can practically feel the second-hand shame bubbling under her skin like the sheer force of it cooks her blood.

Behind Ellen she hears Gwen hiss, 'I _told_ you not to touch my watch!'

'Don't even try to say you weren't having fun. We kicked robot butt!'

Wha…? Ellen has no idea how to respond to that exchange. So, she does not. Instead Ellen hops into the campervan and claims the front seat. She crosses her arms on its top, kneeling, leaving the back of the RV clearly in view before her. Ben and Gwen file in and take the table seats. Grandpa stands between them, looking to each.

'Mind telling me what the two of you were thinking?' Grandpa says mildly.

Ben and Gwen exchange a glance. Gwen's the one to break the silence.

'I was curious about the watch. Ben came after me to, "stop me getting into trouble." Sorry, Grandpa,' Gwen says. She does not raise her gaze from the table.

Ellen schools her expression. That… that was a blatant lie. Not to mention not at all like the Gwen Ellen knows. What _happened_ out there?

'But in his defence, if he didn't– I mean, if he didn't come after me, I might've ended up target practice. So… thanks, Ben,' Gwen says. She grumbles out the last part like it pains her.

Just before Ben speaks, Ellen catches a look of confusion on his face. But it's tidied away in an instant. Ben says, 'Hey, if you hadn't been that alien, we'd both be smears on the forest floor. Grandpa, there were these two robots that came after us in the woods. But we managed to stop them, so, all's well that ends well.'

Ben leans back in his chair, looking pleased with himself. Grandpa, on the other hand, doesn't. If anything, he looks more concerned. He perches a hand on his hip in thought.

'Robots, huh,' he muses. Grandpa shakes his head. 'I was worried the two of you might get popular with these things on your wrists. That's why I asked you not to fool around with them until we know what the heck they are.'

'Did you find anything at that crash site?' Ellen asks.

Grandpa hesitates. He shakes his head. 'Naw, just a hole in the ground and a scrap of metal. It was still warm.'

'The forest?' Gwen says.

With a shake of his head, Grandpa frowns. 'No, the metal.'

Ben lets out a sharp bark of a laugh. 'It must've blown itself up. Told you getting Grandpa would take too long,' Ben boasts.

'Yeah, go us. Instead of them vanishing into thin air, we got two mega-powerful watches stuck on our wrists. Which, just in case you forgot, come with robots that tried to kill us. Way to go, Ben,' Gwen grumbles. She turns back to Grandpa. 'There was nothing there at all? Nothing that could tell us what they are, how they got there, who they belong to... nothing?'

'Nothing,' Grandpa agrees, unfortunately. 'It looks like they're stuck to you. And if someone's sending robots after you, my guess is we'd better help you learn to use them. Fast.'

As one, both Ellen's cousins light up. It's like Grandpa's words are a match to two piles of optimistic kindling.

'Alright! It's a good thing I figured out how they work,' Ben says. He lays the grey watch on the table between him and Gwen. Ellen pushes herself up a little taller to keep it in view, and Ben starts pointing, then pressing and turning at the watch. 'All you do is press this button. Then when the ring pops up, just twist it until you see the guy you wanna be.' As Ben speaks, he demonstrates. Ellen barely catches a glimpse of what looks like black silhouettes. Ben presses the button again and the ring retracts. 'Slam it down, and bammo! We're one of five super-cool alien dudes!

'And if we work out how to use them, no robot stands a chance against us,' Gwen says.

'Forget robots, we could help people in trouble, and I mean _really_ help them!' For a moment, Ben looks morose. 'Not just, you know, make things worse.'

A sudden spit and crackle catches Ellen's attention. Drawn from table to radio, Ellen has the unique perspective of spotting the sound source first as well as seeing her family turn in confused unison towards it. Grandpa quickly steps over and adjusts a dial.

'_Mayday! Mayday! Somebody help us! We're under attack by some sort of_–' The radio man meanders for a second, gathering his courage,_ '_–_I know you're not going to believe me, but… robot!'_

Just like that the connection fizzles out like it never existed in the first place. Well then. Ellen lightly knocks on Ben's head. 'What was that you were saying about helping people in trouble?' she says pointedly.

'Now?' Gwen frets. 'But, we only just got these things. What if we _really_ make things worse?'

Ben gets to his feet. His hand's already on his watch, and he's wearing a set, determined expression. 'Better than not trying at all. Don't those robots sound familiar?'

'I know, I know.' Gwen grimaces. 'I bet they're the same as the ones who attacked us. Which means they're after the watch, and are our responsibility. We can't run from it. Okay, let's go get them.'

'Hold on, both of you,' Grandpa says. He's still at the radio, at the dials, working with a furrowed brow. 'Let me find out where we're going first. Hopefully there's only one robot there. That way, you can both practice without getting into too much danger.'

There's a moment of ringing silence. All sound is reduced to the crackle of the radio, the duo of breathing, and the pounding of Ellen's heart in her throat.

'Got it,' Grandpa says. 'It's not far... But it'll be faster to take the RV. Strap in.'

* * *

Leaving the campervan on the side of the road, Ellen races after her cousins through the woods. Grandpa had nearly thrown a torch at Ellen's head on the way out. She'd caught it, barely, and made sure she kept the light pointed to the ground. The last thing she wants is to let the robot know where her cousins are.

They make an odd picture. Two children, completely different in some ways, the same in others, united in their running towards the sounds of screaming, metal tearing, and what Ellen can best describe as explosions. They're framed by Ellen and Grandpa, one form smaller and one far larger, both lining their path with circles of light.

And as one Ben and Gwen pause. Ellen can hear crickets chirping as they reach for their watches.

'Eenie, meenie, miney,' Ben begins, twisting the watch.

Gwen shoots him a glare. 'You're leaving your alien up to chance?' she says.

'Why not?' Ben says.

With a roll of her eyes, Gwen still mirrors Ben as they both press the face of their watches down. This time Ellen's prepared. She covers her eyes as both her cousins vanish in light. One green, one pink.

When Ellen lowers her arm, her cousins are no longer there. Or, rather, they _are_ there, but they're different.

One of them has red skin covering taut muscles. They have no hair to speak of, but they do have a black mark on their brow. They shift, arms tensing and– there's more arms than Ellen expected. There's four of them, all powerfully built. Same goes for their eyes. There are four of them, pupil-less, and a beady orange. More importantly, they– no, _he_, because he is wearing Ben's shirt, white with a black stripe down the centre. More importantly, he towers even over Grandpa.

If the four-armed alien is Ben, then the blue raptor-like alien must be Gwen. Her tail whips around and nearly slaps into Ellen's chest, so Ellen backs off a bit. She has the appropriate number of limbs save for the addition of a tail. But her legs balance on twin black orb-looking things. She's wearing blue, Gwen's colours, too. It's a lighter shade than her new skin. Unlike Ben, her eyes are still green, but the pupils are also absent.

'So, what can these guys do?' Ellen asks.

All four of Ben's arms flex. 'Not sure, but I bet I can pack a mean punch,' he says, slamming two hands into their opposing palms. He grins.

Abruptly Gwen's eyes are gone. They've vanished behind a mostly black mask of some sort, with a faint blue pattern on the front. 'Not if I get there first,' she rasps, and then– and then she's gone, all that remains just a puff of smoke.

Ellen coughs, waving the dust away.

'Hey, wait up!'

And there goes Ben.

'Come on,' Grandpa says around coughs. 'We should help evacuate.'

'R-right,' Ellen says. She hurries after her cousins and in step with Grandpa.

In all honesty, Ellen didn't expect to see even more fire when she reached the campsite, but she does see fire. She also sees several crushed vehicles, and bits of broken machinery, and screaming panicked people, and smoke pouring from damage and destruction. There's a humming in the air. The air is thick with fears, like someone's about to crush Ellen into paste.

Ellen looks up.

Oh.

That's just great. Good. Yes, that's something to be afraid of.

Emerging from the smoke and towering over the camp is a robot. It's huge. It's made of red metal, forced into the form of a humanoid. It's like an upright cockroach with a periscope for a head, all sat atop three legs.

It easily dwarfs what Ben became and towers even higher over Gwen.

'Looks like papa robot this time,' Ben remarks. Somehow, Ellen's relieved. Whatever Ben and Gwen fought before, it wasn't the same as what now sits above her family. Unfortunately, that means that whatever Ben and Gwen did last time, they can't just repeat and get the same results. Fabulous. Ben lowers his head to address Gwen, Grandpa, and Ellen. 'I'll get gear-head's attention, you guys get the campers to safety.'

Gwen doesn't have visible eyes to roll, but her tone sounds like she is rolling them anyway. 'Yeah yeah, but as soon as everyone's out of the way, I'm showing the robot what the need for speed is.' Gwen vanishes in a blur of motion.

Slower than Gwen, Ben mimics her, and runs directly towards the robot.

Ellen catches a glimpse of the robot holding someone, a park ranger perhaps, and then a blur of blue streaks past and the robot no longer holds anyone. Abruptly, the man reappears in front of Ellen.

He looks around, confused. 'Huh, what? What just…?' he starts. He clasps his hat against his head.

'Hey, ugly!' Ellen hears Ben say. 'You ever tried playing catch?'

Ellen shakes her attention from the robot. She reaches out to grab the man's hand and start tugging him out of the line of fire. 'It's okay! Come on, let's get out of the–'

Ellen's hand–

–help us! We're under attack by some sort of–' Brose hesitates. _Fuck_, how the hell will anyone–

–makes contact with the ranger's, but she lets go almost instinctively. What…? Throwing the thought aside Ellen instead grabs the ranger's sleeve and pulls him after her. It takes three steps before the man shakes off the miasma of confusion and terror enough to run on his own. His legs are far longer than Ellen's. Nodding to herself, Ellen turns back to the minefield of the robot's making.

At first Ellen can't see beyond smoke and fire. But then– there! The robot's turned with its back to Ellen, one arm stretched towards a pile of various metal debris. It shifts. Many red forms part the pile and Ben emerges, looking annoyed. He promptly seizes one of the sheets, spins in place, and tosses the metal directly at the robot's head.

It misses.

The robot easily sidestepped the throw.

It does not, however, dodge the second and third throws that Ben swiftly followed up with. They land with loud, vibrating crashes. The robot swats one out of the way and aims an arm back Ben's way. He promptly starts running.

Ellen's pretty sure Ben can handle himself. He's probably making dumb, distracting comments the whole way through like, _you call that a laser?_ and _my cousin can hit harder than you_. Course, if he refers to Gwen then that's just a statement rather than a dig.

There are several tents pitched up. Ellen runs to a nearby one, pushing the fabric to one side and checking its interior. Nothing but sleeping bags. Ellen nods, then moves to the next, and then the next.

It's the fourth tent that has someone in it. Blonde woman, vaguely familiar.

'No! Don't– it'll know I'm here!' she says, eyes wide with panic.

'It's being distracted,' Ellen says firmly. When people are in trouble the best way to get trust is to be stern, firm, confident and without pause. Ellen has no idea why that hopped into her brain, but it is useful advice, so she'll take it. 'Come on, this is still in the line of fire, and you'll be safe if you move _now_.'

The woman nods. Ellen isn't sure if she fully believes her, but she does at least hurry her way along. Complete with nearly pushing Ellen over in her haste. Ellen freezes for a second. Nothing blips into her brain other than ow, her sides, so that is a good thing.

There is a faint creaking sound. Most of the tents have their ropes pulled up, so that's not coming from there. Ellen shrugs to herself and steps towards the next ten–

And then Ellen isn't standing up anymore.

Where she is, her legs are off the ground. Something latched around her in a millisecond she didn't register, and a heavy grunt abruptly assaults Ellen's ears.

'Wha– huh?' spills out of Ellen's mouth.

Before she can properly register the redness around her waist, it's gone. Ellen tumbles back into a standing position. Dirt. Ground. Sky above her, robot… somewhere. Ellen turns and there is Ben, four eyes wider than before, and– oh, there is a fallen tree where the tents were. Where's the robot? Where'd it go?

'You know, most people start _running_ when a tree falls towards them,' Ben complains. 'But nooo, you walked, and you didn't even walk to one side!'

Ellen gapes. Words, where are her words? 'I, you–' She swallows. 'Thanks.'

'Just get out of the way,' Ben grumbles. One hand pushes Ellen towards the trees, and Ben turns back to the fray.

Nodding shakily, Ellen gives the campsite one last scan. It looks deserted enough. There's a collection of people Ellen can just spy on the opposite side of the tree, so Ellen hurries for it. In the fight, it looks like Gwen concurred with Ellen's assessment of the campsite's clearness, since Ellen spots flashes of blue striking the robot's ankles, then cracking into its arm, then attempting to punch the robot's "eyes."

Gwen's first mistake appears there. At least, the first that Ellen sees. Instead of a smashed eye, the robot swats Gwen out of the air and into a van, the metal caving in around her. Ellen hisses between her teeth and tears her eyes away. She won't do any good there. She has to get out of the way, and hopefully her cousins can save the day.

But, they've got super powered watches, right? They're good. Saving the day is totally possible for them. They'd gotten rid of _two_ robots already! They'll be fine. They'll be good.

'Grandpa!' Ellen calls.

'Over here,' an answer arrives.

Ellen darts through the tiny crowd to Grandpa, who is– good, great, he's pulled himself to the top of the fallen tree, that's a great idea, why not? Good and great, that's the way to do things. She accepts his hand and joins him.

'Are we winning?' Ellen says. Her voice is unsteady and it feels numb to her tongue.

'Well, it looks like B– the uh, the red one took out one of its legs,' Grandpa says. His eyes flick to the side. That's towards the crowd, and he inclines his head meaningfully. Don't say their names. Got it. 'It can't take a step without falling over.'

Gwen screeches to a sudden halt beside Ben. Her scratchy voice doesn't carry over the hiss of flame and the murmur of those behind Ellen. But Ellen does see Ben's head jerk around to fully face Gwen and she does hear Ben say, 'A distraction? Are you serious!'

The robot brings its full attention directly onto Ben, since Gwen vanishes long before Ben even finished his statement. Ben raises his eyes to the sky, then cracks his knuckles.

'Okay, freak,' he says in a loud, ringing voice, 'I've got a bone to pick with you! Your kids? They're the ones who were an actual challenge! You're–'

A blast of laser-fire streaks over his head. Ellen claps her hands over her mouth. When it passes, Ben's fine, but for a moment it looked like, like, like something Ellen never wants to think about again yet had been thinking about far too much on that day.

'–as I was _saying_, you're only good for scrap metal! No, make that _modern art_. You're only good for sticking in a park and letting the seagulls nest on your head!' Ben plants all his hands on his waist and flashes the robot with a cocky grin.

There's a shift of movement behind the robot. No, wait… around the robot? Around the robot's feet, really, but Ellen can't make out what–

Gwen reappears in a flurry of dust. 'Now!' she shouts.

The robot raises its arms to fire again at Ben, but Ben doesn't move. He just swings his arms out wide and then claps, once, with both sets of arms.

It's loud.

It also, apparently, makes a shockwave.

The robot tips backwards, and Gwen has something in her arms. She yanks it and one of the robot's legs shoot off into the sky, what looks like rope attached to its end. With two legs out of commission the robot can't cope with the impact, and it crashes heavily onto the ground. In the next instant Ben and Gwen's there, right by the arm, and they've pulled the arm to point directly at the robot.

It fires.

It hits itself.

And then, there is fire.

Gwen grabs Ben by an arm and they blink to the other side of the clearing in a moment, and in the next the robot utterly detonates.

For several startled seconds, twinkling reddish metal rains from the sky. None of it lands near Ellen, or Grandpa, or the rest of the crowd. It just rains in a concentrated mess and onto the crackling flames. Even those begin to die from lack of fuel. Far above the stars are the flame's mirror but they don't die out. They just watch.

Grandpa breaks the quiet. 'Way to go, ki–! Uh.' Grandpa's gaze darts for a second. 'Speed lizard and four-armed guy?'

Like the cry broke the action's cease-fire, Ben punches the air. 'Alright!' he cheers. 'Who's bad?'

Gwen's helmeted form shakes mournfully. She grabs one of Ben's elbows and tugs him off balance, then starts dragging him in the direction of the RV. Ellen hears Gwen say something, something in an aggravated tone, but the words themselves were unintelligible.

'Who were those guys?' someone says.

Oh. Right. Crowd. Grandpa's hand lands on her shoulder, and he makes a quick gesture with his head. It's one that screams, "let's scram," and Ellen couldn't agree more with the sentiment.

Ellen hops off the tree after Grandpa. The fire is reduced to mere ashes surprisingly quickly. The remains of the robot don't move at all, not even when Grandpa experimentally lobs a broken branch at it.

With a nod, Grandpa motions Ellen to follow him, and they quickly make their way back to the treeline.

* * *

The drive back to their campsite is a strange mix of quiet and loud.

...That's a statement which requires clarification.

The strict, literal view Ellen's ears have is the RV rumbling around her. The motor chuckles and the wheels bounce on mild irregularities. Behind Ellen, Ben and Gwen excitedly share the events of twenty minutes prior, from boasts to competing greatness. That's where the loudness comes from.

But the quiet is there too. Ellen feels like a tsunami had crashed over her and where she sits. Now she's tied to the chair, unable to lift a finger. Sound exists, but it bubbles and it's impossible to decipher. Her world's long since narrowed to the bob and weave of motion and the inside of her eyelids.

It's a shame, then, that they eventually come to a halt.

'Alright, kids,' Grandpa says, cutting over their conversation. 'You can talk more in the morning.'

Ellen isn't sure how time progressed. But progress it did. The motions of night raced by, and Ellen finds herself collapsed in a sleeping bag, in a tent, wondering how the world had gotten so big, and if in the morning she'd wake up with dreams. She hears faint, familiar chimes of Gwen's watch. Ellen doesn't open her eyes. Gwen can do what she likes. Ellen needs to rest her frazzled–

She still has the bracelet in her pocket. Not a pocket she's wearing. Pyjamas don't normally have pockets. But it's bundled in the jacket pooled by her pillow for the morning.

...She'll work out what to do with it later. In the meantime, Ellen roots around and pulls out the marker. It'd been in her pocket the whole night. Without another thought, Ellen tosses it into the bottom of her sleeping bag.

* * *

**Hi. I'm new to this site, so I currently don't know if the paragraph breaks will eat themselves or not. I also have no idea what the culture here is like. Is stating that the writer doesn't own the original work still a thing? I don't. Show would've been awful if I owned it.**

**Regarding the OC. I don't trust myself to adequately write from any of the established character's points of view, so, the OC is absolutely a cop-out. Here's to it not being irritating! If it is, then hopefully my writing style improves and makes that less of a thing as I go. If this story continues, it ****is**** just going to be a retreading with an OC and an Omnitrix. I don't know how often this will update or if it will update at all. I mean, I created the document halfway through May 2018 apparently, so, that says a lot about my attention span and/or writing speed.**

**Oh, also, that middle alignment at the start is not an error. Unless it's absent or converted the rest of the text into itself, in which case, it's absolutely a mistake I'm currently struggling to fix and I apologise for any confusion and lack of clarity. Double that if it's lacking the aforementioned paragraph breaks.**


	2. Varieties Of Verities

To Ellen's surprise, when she wakes it isn't in a startled rush from panicked dreams. Those are called nightmares. Not dreams. Her mistake. Still, it's startling to just wake up in a tent in a sleeping bag burrito with nothing wrong. There's no world shattering around Ellen's head, no sky falling, no floods rising, no ships crashing, trees burning, assassins prowling, in-laws failing to appear, the whole shebang. Ellen just wakes up not knowing what moment she shifted from sleeping to alert.

She does, however, hear the sound of a zipper opening. Or is it closing? Ellen pulls herself up, sleeping bag rustling like a bush in the wind. The tent is empty. Faint morning sunlight glows on the other side of the fabric, outlining the empty sleeping bag on the opposite side of the tent. Gwen's gone.

'Shh!'

That catches Ellen's attention. Her head tilts as she listens. There's a faint sound of whispering. Basic logic time. Grandpa probably wouldn't be whispering in the early hours of the morning. Gwen's missing. Ben and Gwen both acquired unfathomable power the previous night. Basic, bare bones, hardly trying logic equals: Ben and Gwen are the ones whispering themselves into mischief.

For a moment Ellen toys with staying put. It's the first real day of the summer vacation. After the hassle of last night, she deserves to take a break. Sleep. Ignore everything around her. Pretend nothing's gone wrong. That type of thing. Well, it did go okay. Gwen and Ben beat the bad guys. The day was saved. A whole block of people lost their tents and had dents bashed into their cars, but on the whole they all lucked out that the twins found those watches and were proactive with them. Ellen's still in her sleeping bag, her pillow right behind her, and the last vestiges of sleep still clinging against her skin. All she needs to do is roll back down and rest.

Instead she reaches for her jacket. The tent zipper, along with the morning's faint chill, chases away any tiredness Ellen retains within seconds. All the colours look washed out and dull, like the day itself is still waking itself up before its shades can bloom. It's a far cry from the purples and oranges of last night dancing across the grass. The surrounding area is just as empty as it was when they'd arrived. Nobody else appeared during the night, then? Good thing too, because Ellen spots Gwen and Ben a fair way from the two tents, right at the picnic table they'd eaten dinner at. Ellen closes the tent behind her.

Both are seated at the table. Gwen tap-taps at her laptop. Ben has his head slumped onto his elbow, his other hand idly picking at splinters on the table's face.

'Here's the timer,' Gwen says authoritatively. 'We'll each take turns turning into our aliens. While one of us does that, the other one takes notes and watches the time on here. When I turn back, we start the second timer, and we wait to see how long it takes for the watch to recharge. Then we write down everything we found out about that alien, and we swap over.'

'Right,' Ben drawled. 'So, I'll go first!'

'Hey, I thought of it, _I'm_ going first!'

Ellen stifles a disbelieving snort. Leave it to Gwen to turn magical shape changing watches into a school science fair. They seem like they're just fine. And if the two of them are occupied, there should be very little panic and mayhem… until they became bored, at which point Ellen will flee for the hills. Nodding to herself, Ellen tries the RV door.

To Ellen's surprise, it's unlocked. It's a morning full of gentle shocks, isn't it?

The first thing Ellen does is head to the bathroom. The moment she spies the mirror she sighs in relief. No marker. Now, if that's because Ben couldn't find a marker, or because he chose not to retaliate, Ellen has no way to figure out. In the meantime, Ellen tugs open a drawer and puts the marker away. There. Safe and sound, as all things should be.

After dressing Ellen roots around the cupboards, finds cereal and milk, and sets herself at the table.

So.

Yesterday was a bowl of de-alphabetized soup, wasn't it just?

First Ellen found out she was going camping with her cousins, then her brain pretty much exploded with memories of _somebody_ dying, then her cousins found magic watches, then set the forest on fire, and to wrap the whole thing up they'd fought a gigantic robot. And won.

The glass lights with a brief green tint.

Did all of yesterday really happen? Ellen has no clue. The watches, yes, those happened, because Gwen and Ben are outside the window playing with them as Ellen eats. Wait, did Ben just turn into something? Ellen glances outside. There is a giant green bug of some sort, similar size as a small car, with frantically beating wings and a head like a, like a… Ellen actually doesn't know what it looks like. A moose? It has four tube-y things sticking out of its head, that's for sure. As Ellen watches, Ben's head rears momentarily, and a green goop of some sort splatters near Gwen's shoes. Gwen shouts up at him in anger and throws a stone at him.

Ellen deliberately turns her head away.

Suddenly, her cereal looks highly unappetising.

No, Ellen is positive the watch shenanigans happened. What about the first weirdness, then? Putting the spoon down, Ellen instead pulls out the bracelet.

It looks just the same as she remembers. It's a plain looking thing, with a number of different yellow beads. Course, none of the yellows are consistent. Some are a faded, worn looking wood, different shades of paint flaking off of it. Others are a glassy type of clear material, or not clear at all, but distinctly plastic looking. Even the shapes are inconsistent. Diamonds and cubes and ovals and spheres, all in a random array. One of the wood pieces has a crack tracing through it. A plastic one has been chipped. In fact, the whole thing looks like different beads had been replaced over time.

But, even with that oddity, it looks like a bracelet. It's innocent, like a vampire on an overcast afternoon where the sunlight won't burn and their hunger's tucked away. It's not the type of thing to be a cursed, evil thing, not with the sunny associations yellow has. _That_ is why it's so diabolical. Ellen smiles. Diaboli-oli-olical. That's a super fun word. No, focus Ellen. She schools her expression and glares down at it.

One bead innocently reflects a baby bit of sunlight.

Ellen steels herself.

She raises her hand.

It hovers, a few scant moments away from touching the bracelet.

Come on, Ellen, it's just a science experiment.

Ellen picks the bracelet up, her eyes unintentionally screwing themselves shut.

For several seconds Ellen doesn't dare open her eyes. If she opens them, she'll be somewhere else. If she does, she'll be back on that staircase. If she does, she'll be falling. She'll be falling and her neck snapping and then she doesn't know if she'll make it out to the other side.

Seconds pass.

Oh. Right. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Ellen opens her eyes. There's nothing but the RV around her. Bracelet still in hand, Ellen lets her head fall into her palm.

She's so stupid. She had to touch the stupid bracelet to get it out of her stupid pocket in the first place.

'You're real, though,' Ellen mutters at the bracelet. She absolutely found it in the attic. It being in her hand attests to that, unless Ellen is extremely skilled at hallucinating. But there's no proof that the whole "dying thing" actually happened. Right? It only exists in Ellen's memories, and memories are pretty fickle things for all they are a sum of their owners. Her brain could always be playing with her consciousness like the logic of a dream.

Except… dreams fade. Don't they? Ellen doesn't dream all that much, though she's scared of being trapped in a nightmare just as much as anyone, and she is pretty good at figuring out when she's in her own imagination. But most dreams lose their sharp edges over time, burning away quicker than regular memories do. They're the wire-thin candles to normal life's fat ones. What Ellen remembers is garbled and kooky, but it's exactly as they were before Ellen went to sleep last night. Not even the chaos of yesterday shook them out of her head.

Ellen slowly sets the bracelet onto the table again.

Come to think of it, didn't something odd happen during that fight? Something felt strange. Think, Ellen… it was pretty early on in the fight, and-

It hits Ellen. She'd touched that ranger's hand and then she'd heard, no, seen, no… felt? Was? She… she _was_ that ranger who called for help. The same ranger? Or were they different, and Ellen had just… ended up with… argh, none of this makes sense.

Okay, okay, backtrack it, follow the logic from A to B and something nice might be at the end. Ellen touched the man in the fight. She… she then _was_ the ranger who'd called for help, whose voice they'd heard back in the RV and was the reason why they knew people were in trouble. Then Ellen was herself again, still among the fire and the chaos, like nothing happened? But that, but that meant….

No.

No, f-fuh, _screw_ this. Screw this. It isn't terrifying, that isn't what all of _this_ is. All of this nonsense was just adrenaline. Ellen had the idea of memory on the brain and the panic in the air made her associate the call for help with the ranger's face, and she'd wrapped it all up in a daydream of her memory problems.

That was _it_. Nothing more. Everything less.

The RV door swings open. In heavy steps, Grandpa pulls himself up into the RV.

'Ah, morning, Ellen,' Grandpa says. His expression smooths out into polite curiosity. 'What's that there? Never thought you were the jewellery type.'

In almost every story Ellen's ever read, keeping silent about the Big Thing the story revolves around always seemed like an awful idea. Is there a dragon hiding under the bridge? Is there a t-talking tree watching you through your window? Did your kids find uncomfortable body parts on a beach? Generally, all of that sounds like things people should tell adults. Or, if the protagonists are already adults, tell the police and other emergency services.

Watches that cause shapeshifting, for example, is something to talk about. By telling Grandpa the whole story, Ben and Gwen absolutely did the smart and logical thing. Then again, Ellen and Grandpa were the ones to stumble across the twins. They hadn't a choice in revealing the Big Thing. Who knew if they'd tell the truth if they weren't tracked down?

For a brief instant, Ellen can picture both furiously wrapping their arms in bandages and switching to long sleeved shirts and jackets, even when they inevitably enter the desert. Ellen shivers. Even Ellen will leave her jacket behind when that heat hits.

The point is, the logical thing to do is tell Grandpa the truth. Ellen would be an absolutely foolish idiot not to tell Grandpa everything, from the memory of another Ellen to the flash from the ranger.

Ellen says, 'I found it in the attic. Neat, isn't it? Are Ben and Gwen okay?'

As Grandpa peers out the window, Ellen plants a hand against her face.

Guess she's an idiot, then.

But this is still salvageable. Sure, she changed the subject, but Ellen can just turn the conversation back at any moment. Just start it with an _actually, Grandpa_, and go on from there.

'They're just having fun,' Grandpa says warmly. 'You aren't going to join them?'

Now, it is Ellen's turn. Answer the question, return the topic to the bracelet. Simple.

'No, no. It's their moment, you know? I don't want to interrupt.'

Ellen smiles ruefully. Some part of her lets out an internally loud, frustrated screech. Because that's as good as a mallet to her teeth now, isn't it? There's no chance she can tell Grandpa what's wrong anymore. After all, today is Ben and Gwen's day, with real, tangible, and obvious change in their lives. Ellen's just, well, Ellen, plus a bracelet. How can Ellen even prove it?

Besides. They went through a lot last night. They deserve the attention.

…_Attention_.

It hits Ellen with all the weight of a lightning strike. She's the rod in the storm, one end of a magnet zipping to meet the other, the feet slipping out under her from running on an oil-slick floor. It's obvious. There is an obvious—blatantly so—reason why Ellen's memory problems exist.

The thing about memories is that they are only recordings of the past. Each time they're accessed they're rewound and replayed on an old VCR. Each time played, elements of the memories are recreated, but others are corrupted, like fingerprints left on the tape.

Oh, sure. Books and cameras, they existed. But words can only focus on one sentence at a time, and their author can't ensure each reader will imagine exactly what they intend. And cameras? Pictures only keep a moment suspended in time, and only from a single direction. Recordings, while they retain sound and sometimes wind, lose so much in translation. Textures. Tastes. Smells. And smells, so they say, are the best way to connect with memories.

Just like a recording can be edited, memories can be liars too.

Why _wouldn't _Ellen remember—sorry, "remember"—a sudden burst of memories that don't belong to her, right after Ben and Gwen discovered magical watches?

There was only one goal in Ellen's mind. She _wanted_ to be _special_ too. Well, tough luck, brain, Ellen thinks as sternly as she can. It's her cousins who are the ones in danger, in excitement, and in need of support. The last thing Ellen needs is to go crazy. Every puzzle has an answer, and here is Ellen's. After all, Ellen has a pretty good memory, so it stands to reason that Ellen is also good at deluding herself. Recall something incorrectly once, and Ellen thinks she has a magic brain. Psh, yeah right. Thank goodness she realised the truth before she said something to Grandpa about it.

Somehow, Grandpa doesn't turn to Ellen or spot what Ellen can only assume were a myriad of emotions rippling over her face. Ellen takes a breath. She schools herself. Once she's steady again, Ellen asks, 'What are we doing next?'

Grandpa hums in thought. 'Well, I say we let them have their fun for the morning. The two of us can have breakfast. We'll pack up the tents too. After that we're making our way to Washington DC.'

'Why are _we_ packing the tents? They're need to wait for their watches to turn back on between their shapeshifting, right?'

Outside, the giant bug that is Ben swoops down, nearly knocking Gwen over, and falls over himself in choking, body wracking laughter. There's a sudden, yet familiar, flash of bright red light, and Ben is human again, still on his back, still laughing.

'Yes, yes they are,' Grandpa acknowledges. There's an odd look in Grandpa's eyes, and as he speaks there's a sudden odd grin that crosses Grandpa's face. 'But we're the ones who'll put the two of them through their paces.'

Is that glee in Grandpa's gaze? Why is Grandpa acting gleeful all of a sudden?

Behind Ellen the toaster abruptly sings. Grandpa pats Ell—

—forth. One drone plummets in a blaze of blue energy, sparks flying, and the other strikes directly into their target. He skids backwards from the force of the blow but there isn't a scratch on him. He isn't even phased. It was a light show for all the good it did.

He looks up, eyes narrow.

'You,' he hisses.

'It's over, Vilgax! You're—

—en's shoulder.

Ellen freezes.

Grandpa's no longer beside Ellen. Instead he's at the toaster, humming softly under his breath as Ellen desperately tries to catch her own.

That… what was that?

No. No, no, see, this, this just makes Ellen's theory so much more plausible, and that's good. That's great. See? Robots and aliens and lasers, of course Ellen made that up, since, since that is on Ellen's mind. The daydream even used baby versions of the robot who attacked the camp.

See? It makes perfect sense.

Ellen needs to stop shivering. There's no reason for it. That siren wasn't real. It might have seemed loud, but it was only her imagination. Better to support Grandpa's gleeful plotting than to imagine, well, to imagine, anything, anything like that, at all. It's just a dream. Didn't Grandpa say they were going to help the twins learn to use their watches? That's far more interesting than anything Ellen's mind can make up. Everything is fine. What's Grandpa's plan, anyway?

* * *

It turns out, Grandpa's plan was and is a truly evil one, far eviler than Gwen's with the marker. Thankfully, that plot seems to have fallen through, but Ellen can never be too careful. That's how the saying goes, right?

When Grandpa sat back down with his breakfast he'd brought a notebook. Ellen didn't pry, especially since he only seemed to write one word, barely a sentence, with each transformation Ben and Gwen experimented with.

There was the large dog and the quick raptor Gwen already became, but also a ghostly monster, a fish monster, and a blue one made of crystal.

Then in Ben's half he had the flame filled one, the one with two pairs of arms, the big bug one, and then one that looked like molten electronics and one that was a tiny baby grey frog.

Ellen wishes she'd looked at those notes. Currently, last Ellen saw, it was left in a glovebox.

Because somehow, after they'd driven into Washington and the twins stopped a robbery and an apartment building burning to the ground, Grandpa had somehow worked out Ben's tiny frog alien was far, far, _far_ smarter than all of their smarts combined, including Grandpa. Ellen hadn't even heard of imaginary numbers and simultaneous equations before Grandpa sat Ben down with a very tiny pencil and told Ben to solve the equations on it.

Ben complained. Extensively.

He still did it, though, and Ellen has no clue if it's correct or not. She was in charge of cheating prevention and the timer, so she thankfully didn't need to mark it, and Gwen was busy doing as many laps around the block as she could before Ben finished. From Grandpa's approving noises, Ben got them correct, somehow, without cheating. Gwen was somewhere in the hundreds of laps. Still. Ellen wishes she'd peeked at that notebook, because she badly wants to know how Grandpa worked out the frog alien was super smart.

Unfortunately, Ellen can't find out. They're in a shopping centre, after all, far away from the RV and the notebook's secrets. Maybe tonight, when Grandpa gets it out again, Ellen can take a look. He took notes all through Gwen literally halting a robbery in its tracks, and Ben rescuing children from fires, and Ben's maths test, and Gwen's sprint. Grandpa surely will take it out tonight.

Either way, they're in Washington City. The schedule is that they'll shop for supplies, then for the rest of the evening they'll take a look at some sights before stopping for the night. Grandpa hasn't said, but Ellen's fairly sure they'll work on something alien in the evening. It makes Ellen glad she said nothing about her imaginary "ability." Imagine if Grandpa decided to test it. That would do wonders for Ellen's sanity.

Grandpa abruptly stops walking. Ellen scrambles to halt the trolley before it can slam into his heels.

'No canned eel either,' Grandpa mutters. Ellen cranes her neck, but the shelf is just out of sight. Grandpa says, 'We'll have to make do with just the fish oil.'

Ellen half expects Gwen and Ben to protest in stereo in Ellen's ears. Weirdly, they don't. In fact, as far as Ellen can see they're nowhere in sight. As the youngest of the three cousins, the task of trolley marshalling went to Ellen. Ellen's halfway sure that's faulty logic. But with both gone, Ellen can't exactly protest.

Is she supposed to reply to Grandpa? It doesn't sound like it. Mom usually talks to herself when they go shopping. It's probably, possibly, the same, and Grandpa isn't actually talking to Ellen.

'Excuse me, sir?' a crisp, irritated voice says. Its source is a clerk. He'd turned the aisle corner and strides directly towards Grandpa. 'The two children in the cereal aisle, do they belong to you?'

Grandpa glances behind him. Ellen shrugs, but he's looking around Ellen and at the empty spaces there, not at her.

'They might be. Is everything alright?'

The clerk huffs. 'Come with me,' he commands. He leads Grandpa, and Ellen by association, backwards along their trek.

Ben and Gwen are in the middle of the aisle with another clerk hovering over them. Ben has a hand in his pocket, scowl directed at the ground, and Gwen bores a hole into his forehead in turn. Around them, the aisle of cereal looks exactly like a herd of miniature yaks decided to trample each shelf and its wares.

'These two. Are they yours?' the first clerk asks.

'Yes,' Grandpa says, eyebrow raised in curiosity. 'What happened in here?'

The second, sentry clerk, scoffs. 'Who cares what happened? So long as you pay these two's _damages_,' he says. Gwen, even mid-Ben-glare, flinches.

Ellen's sight is abruptly full of brightly coloured cardboard. The trolley grounds to an uncompromising halt.

Backing up, Ellen blinks. One clerk had filled the trolley, overflowing, with some brand of cereal. Sumo Slammers? Sounds familiar. She may've heard of that on the playground once or twice. Maybe.

'Mega Mart thanks you for your patronage,' the nearest clerk says in a falsely sweet tone.

Which one is which, again? Ellen's long since lost track. In another blink both clerks are gone, Ellen's gaze blinded by boxes.

The aisle is really, truly trashed. Not all the boxes are in the trolley, but it doesn't look like any cereal survived. Ellen frowns and takes a closer look. They aren't broken like they were beaten. They're torn open, roughly, in a rapid rush. And only boxes of one brand— no, no, not even that, just boxes with the Sumo Slammer declared on it.

Nope. The pieces aren't connecting into anything logical. A box slides off the trolley and hits the ground loudly. Faint music trickles from far above. Gwen and Ben kept their tongues and assorted glares right where Ellen first saw them.

Grandpa breaks the silence.

'So, why are we buying all this cereal?'

Ben bursts, expression twisting in anger. 'Well, we would've only had to buy the one that I found the gold Sumo Slammer card in if Gwen hadn't _butted_ in with her big _butt_.'

Oh. What?

'Uh, _hello?_' Gwen says stridently. 'You were trashing the whole cereal aisle just to find some stupid piece of cardboard!'

Ellen's still confused.

'So what? It's not like Grey Matter's useful for anything else,' Ben grumbles.

An idea whispers in the back of Ellen's mind. She ignores it, getting out a mental leaf blower and expelling it from her brain, uncaring of how the thought ruthlessly clings to her cells.

'Seriously? We just got these watches, and you're already complaining about it?' Gwen snaps.

'What's grey matter?' Ellen says helplessly.

'The little frog one,' Gwen clarifies. It doesn't help all that much, because, _grey matter?_ How? Why? When did they talk nicknames?

Screw it.

Ellen places her hand against one of the boxes, screwing her courage into as tight a ball as she can and— and nothing's happening. No memories, no hallucinations, nothing.

See? Ellen tells herself. You're normal. Nothing to worry yourself over.

Course, Ellen's left exactly as lost as before.

'Now, Ben,' Grandpa says, 'I can appreciate how much your collection means to you, but don't you think using your watch like that is a little irresponsible?'

For a second Ben deflates. 'Maybe you're right, Grandpa. I don't deserve a gold Sumo Slammer card.'

Behind Ben, Gwen's eyebrow crooks, unimpressed.

On cue, Ben's head snaps up, and so does his tone. 'I mean, it's not like I rescued a bunch of people from a burning building or anything like that!' Gwen elbows him sharply. 'Ow!'

'Just reminding you the fire was a distraction,' Gwen says primly. 'If anything, I should get a bigger reward for taking down the guys who did it.'

'Kids,' Grandpa says. 'Helping others is not a competition.'

Ellen has to ground her feet and dig in deep to force the trolley into motion after Grandpa. It reluctantly starts rolling. Then it's moving much faster than Ellen thought it could. Oh no. Stopping it will be super, super tricky.

Ben hisses at Gwen, 'But if it was, I'd be winning.'

'In your dreams, mega dweeb.'

Ellen doesn't say a word. What can she say? There's negative space in the things Ellen should speak. Besides, she has a trolley to babysit.

Almost amusingly quickly, Ben diverges from their wandering foot bus with a distracted mumble.

Gwen loudly and deliberately sighs. 'I'll keep an eye on the shrimp,' she tosses over her shoulder.

That sounds fair to Ellen. Ben's watch is still in the red, but from the stories Ellen's heard Ben can still surround himself in chaos, and had done so long before he gained the supernatural watch. But even he wouldn't mess around twice in the same store. Would he? Just the thought of doing something makes Ellen imagine Mom looking down at her in disinterested disappointment.

A hand lands on Ellen's own shoulder. She jumps, startled. It's only Grandpa.

'In that case, why don't we check out the pet department?' Grandpa says.

That's a non sequitur if Ellen's ever heard one. What's a non sequitur? No-sequence? Words don't make sense sometimes, just like Grandpa's suggestion. Not unless Grandpa's looking for live materials, in which case Ellen's pretty sure the RV door would be busted in by the animal police.

What will that look like? A goose, dressed in police black and blue, wings flapping, in the very enclosed space of the RV. Ellen shivers. If that happens, Ellen's locking the bathroom door behind her before she learns how to spell "non sequitur." Shoot, that word is going to bother Ellen all day, she can tell.

Grandpa aids Ellen with the trolley by tugging the front along behind him. Ellen smiles in gratitude, but her sentiments hit Grandpa's back.

The pet department's full of chirping and croaking and that weird squeaking sound rabbits and gerbils make that isn't quite a squeak and it doesn't stick in the imagination as well as a bark or a hiss. But it's full of motion, cages, and Ellen finds herself cooing at a pretty parrot dressed up in white.

Okay, yes, Ellen's in charge of the trolley. But—! But but but, the parrot has the silly yellow punk hair. One cannot say no to the silly punk hair.

Curious, the bird hops closer to the bars, head tilted and cooing at Ellen.

'Hello,' Ellen whispers.

'Ah, Ellen?' Grandpa's abruptly there, his hand on Ellen's wrist. Ellen bites back a flinch, but nothing happens, no other hallucination. All that happens is Grandpa saying, 'Be careful. Birds like this will bite anything that comes close, and that includes your fingers.'

'Really?' But the bird looks so sweet and pretty. Good Polly bird wouldn't do that, would it?

Grandpa smiles faintly. A plastic bag rustles in his other hand. It hits Ellen that he's not meeting her eyes, instead looking somewhere over her shoulder.

'It's not that all birds dislike people. That's just how some of them are. Best not to test and put your fingers through the bars, okay?'

Ellen looks down at the ground. Trainers are nice. They're comfy and easy to wear. Ellen also pulls her hand out of Grandpa's and hopes the best she can that Grandpa doesn't notice. 'Okay. Sorry, Grandpa.'

'That's alright. Why don't we take a look at some of these hamsters?'

Grandpa leads the way, but Ellen takes a second to glance over her shoulder. There's another aisle, another shopper turning the corner, a beady black camera on the ceiling. All in all, nothing that Grandpa would've been looking at. Maybe Gwen and Ben ran past.

Hamsters are less cute than birds.

One runs up to the edge of the cage, planting his feet against the bars, looking imploringly up at Ellen. She grins, but doesn't try touch them this time. Okay, hamsters are cute too, Ellen was wrong.

Ellen frowns. Grandpa's standing next to her. Ben and Gwen are off somewhere. The ground shakes faintly. It must've come from a truck rumbling nearby. The pet department is empty of other shoppers, and far more importantly, where did the trolley go?

Oh, that's what a non sequitur is. It's when someone abruptly changes the subject without any link to things before. Ellen… she probably does that a lot, now that she's thinking about it.

'Hey, Grandpa…?' Ellen starts to ask.

A meteor crashes into the ground behind Ellen.

No, not literally.

But the sound is loud and broad and sudden enough that Ellen flinches straight into the hamster cage. It rattles. The hamster squeaks in sudden fright. It kicks up straw in fright, and belatedly Ellen's shoulder acknowledges a line of pain across her arm.

Ellen spins around.

At the same time, Grandpa sucks in a gasp.

Looming over them is a giant, multi eyed and horned toad, complete with wrinkled skin and gnarled toes and a faint growl in its throat. And by giant, Ellen doesn't mean big, she means flipping enormous. Glass-like red eyes balefully stare down at them.

'...Oh, that's good,' Ellen says faintly. Her back thumps into the cage.

Grandpa's arm appears between her and the frog. Oh, he's blocking it from Ellen. That's nice. That's good.

'Who are you?' Grandpa says. To the frog. Toad. Frog? What's the difference between them? Ellen can't remember and she has more important things to focus on, such as the giant amphibian who Grandpa thinks can talk.

'Ah, curious, are you?' a voice calls. Ellen shifts her gaze from the large number of eyes upward, barely a few degrees. There's a man sat on the back of the toad, also horned. No, it's a helmet, one with what looks like a tomato thrown at it, dripping. The man adjusts it with one hand.

Red light flickers between the man's horns and-

'Duck!'

Grandpa shoves Ellen over, nearly landing on her as a beam—an actual, literal beam of lighting—lances out from the man. It strikes where Ellen was standing, strikes the _cage_, and Ellen hears what she can only describe as a rodent screaming.

The light doesn't die. It swells, electrifying the air, racing across the bars, and makes Ellen's hair stand on end. But in the light, Ellen can barely make out a twisting, naked shape, and the snapping of bars.

Then it's gone. Both light and cage crumble. All that's left is the hamster. He isn't a hamster anymore. Its fur is patchy, bare skin showing discolouration and pulsing, swollen veins. Its eyes are swollen too. The whole hamster, for lack of a better phrase, is the size of a large dog. Muscles twitch and hold themselves taut, leaving the questionable hamster itself twitchy, growly, glarey. And the buck teeth? From Ellen's angle of _on the floor within bite range_, they look nowhere close to friendly.

Another lance of light hisses and snaps out. The hamster's head twitches around to face Ellen. Oh goodie, red eyes, as if it needs to look more intimidating. In the corner of Ellen's gaze a bird undergoes the same swelling and agonizing treatment. Part of her recognises the bird she'd walked away from. The rest of Ellen tries to scramble backwards. She doesn't move. She doesn't move. When did she turn into a statue?

Faintly, Ellen hears, 'Behold the genius of Doctor Animo!' A growl builds in the hamster's throat.

Suddenly, Grandpa's hand is there around Ellen's wrist, and she? No longer stone. She can move. 'Run!' he says, shoving her to her feet, and it's enough to shake Ellen into using her legs. One foot in front of the other, quick march, except it's a sprint and not a march.

And she's yelling for help.

Marching doesn't involve running or yelling, not from the marcher's point of view, and why is she thinking about marching when there's a monster hamster after— oh good, good, great, it's actually running after them. Wonderful. This is fine. Ellen does running. She can run. She came thirteenth on track day. Hamster would probably be busy eating who's coming last. And in the race of two, between shelves and bleached floors and achingly cheerful supermarket music, between Ellen and Grandpa Ellen is absolutely going to run out of steam first and once the hamster's done gnawing her bones it might decide she's not fat enough not to go in for seconds and it'll catch up with Grandpa who will be with Ben and Gwen by that time and maybe Ellen will have a nice funeral but it'll be interrupted by an angry hamster who'll gobble up her cousins and then go for Grandpa for its afternoon tea.

A box whips itself off a shelf.

It whistles over Ellen's shoulder and she stumbles, she stumbles and her feet aren't where she needs them. Her knees crack into the supermarket floor and she tumbles, hands scrambling to catch herself. Another box flies over her, and another.

Ellen risks a glance behind her. The hamster's close, a box between its teeth, another smacking it in the eye in the moment Ellen looks.

Hauling herself up on her knees, Ellen dives around a corner.

'Grandpa…?' Ellen says, voice shaking.

'Not quite.'

The voice has the thinness of a whisper but the rasp of a corpse, and between a blink, a shape forms in the centre of the aisle. It's tall, long, thin, and floating in the air, with frail limbs, long fingers, and a single wandering eye. It's a ghost.

'But I'm here to take Fluffy back to the pound!' it, _Gwen_, says, and she hurls another bag of cat food directly at the hamster's head.

It hits, forcing the hamster to rear backwards, only to hit the ground with an angry hiss up at Gwen. But when it swipes, and it bites, all Gwen does is drift upwards and she's easily out of reach. Its jaws snap the next box Gwen throws in half.

'Feisty, aren't you?' Gwen says dismissively. The ghostly alien's "tail," for lack of a better word, coils around the nearest shelf. 'Well, let's see you get a bite of _this!_'

Wares topple in a loud rush, striking both hamster and ground. Before the hamster can do more than shriek, the shelf itself rises and slams onto it. Once, twice, thrice, until the hamster stops moving.

Gwen swoops down. Her back's to Ellen, most of her parallel to the ground to be on eye level with the hamster.

'I think you got it,' Ellen says. It doesn't feel like she spoke. But her lungs moved, her throat breathed in and out, so she must have spoken.

With the hamster still, the sounds of the supermarket filter back into Ellen's hearing. There's the rattling tumble of pet food coming to a halt, and further away Ellen hears running footsteps and distant screams. Shouting too, less afraid and more furious. But a pair of footsteps are louder, growing louder, and accompanied by Grandpa's calls.

He and Ben round the nearest corner. 'Ellen, there you are,' Grandpa says in relief. Ellen's stomach swoops. She got left behind. Grandpa's eyes land on Gwen and the hamster faintly visible through Gwen's translucency. 'And… uh…?'

'A freak of a ghost,' Ben mutters.

Gwen swings upright, her thready arms crossed just below the hourglass on her chest. 'Nice going, dweeb,' Gwen says. It sounds like she's constantly gasping for air. Ellen wants to cover her ears and run or even powerwalk away. 'If you hadn't wasted your time hunting for a cheap piece of cardboard, you could've helped.'

'And you're wasting your time gloating at me!' Ben says, jabbing over Gwen's shoulder. 'You're letting the bad guy get away!'

Gwen's single eye widens.

'—hington BC!'

Something punches the store's roof. The rumble is loud, rubble falling several aisles away, and a pair of giant wings flare and swoop out of a distant, newly made hole, momentarily blocking out the faint evening light pouring inside the building.

'Leave Polly to me,' Gwen says determinedly, already drifting upwards.

'Wait, _wait_.'

Grandpa's voice gives Gwen pause. 'What? He's getting away!'

'He is, and on that bird he's getting away, fast, much faster than this alien can travel,' Grandpa says, eyebrows furrowed in his seriousness. 'If you chase after him, you risk changing back when you're fifty feet in the air. Or worse.'

The single eye on Gwen shifts upwards, then downwards. As it moves it makes a sound like wet meat squelching between palms.

'I'll stay near the ground,' Gwen decides. 'Catch up when you can.'

With that she dives directly through the nearest shelf. Ellen spots her in the next aisle, briefly, but then she's through the other side and out of sight. Ellen looks down at the still hamster. It's breathing, faintly, but Ellen spies bruises forming where its fur is absent.

Ellen wants to say _I'm sorry_, but… is it even able to understand what happened to it?

Grandpa speaks first. 'Well, you heard her. Come on, let's get to the RV before they're too far ahead.'

Ben sulkily follows. For a moment, Ellen's rooted to the spot, staring at the glassy eyes of the hamster. Parts of the hamster's fur is red. That's strange. Ellen remembers the hamster before, and it was only brown then.

'Ellen!'

'Uh— yeah, coming!' Ellen says, sparing it one last glance, and she follows.

* * *

The sky darkens further as the RV rolls down the Washington roads. Moderate traffic exists. It sits around corners and appears on occasion down future streets, but Ellen's attention's caught on the dark night sky and the faint flashes of white wings between buildings. There are frighteningly few of those. Considering only one giant mutated bird exists, that both makes sense and is a very, very good thing because mutated animals are Ellen's current second least favourite thing in the world, but it also sucks because it makes finding the bird very difficult.

What's Ellen doing again? Ah, right. Birdwatching.

Ellen pauses. Birdwatching. Of course. Why wouldn't a cheery sounding term just pop into her brain when she's trying to focus. With a shake of Ellen's head she rescans the sky. Nada.

'...the matter, Ben?' Grandpa says. Ellen only tunes in halfway, but she can guess how the sentence started.

'It's not fair,' Ben says. 'When Gwen uses the watch, everything goes her way, and everyone knows she's a hero. But when I do it, nothing goes right.' His next words are muffled, like he's talking into the window rather than people. 'And then the _dweeb's_ there to lord it over me.'

Nothing out the back window either. Ellen turns back to the front seats. 'I haven't noticed anything like that.'

Ben scoffs. 'Oh, you didn't notice that when_ I_ turned into Heatblast, the forest caught fire, but when Gwen went all dog alien, she lucked out and beat up robot drones. And then last night, I saved everyone from that apartment fire, but it was "just a distraction" and _Gwen_ got to stop the bad guys!? You noticed _none_ of that?'

Ellen doesn't know a lot of things, but she's positive Ben won't react well to her honest opinion.

'That's just luck, isn't it?' Ellen says.

'Oh, _and_, I'm the one having to do math homework during summer vacation! Just because I got Grey Matter! It's totally unfair,' Ben snaps, like he hadn't even heard Ellen's contribution. 'Why isn't Gwen doing that!'

'But Gwen—'

Ellen aims to say, _she went on that sprint_, but one glare from Ben punches the words to the back of Ellen's throat. No matter how Ellen coaxes, they refuse to take a second shot. She ducks her head and scans the sky. Nothing.

'You've only had those watches for a few days,' Grandpa says reassuringly. 'I know you want to be a hero, but that takes time and hard work.'

'Tell that to Gwen,' Ben mutters.

Ellen worries at her lip. 'I don't want to interrupt, but I can't see the wannabe dinosaur anymore.' She drops her gaze from the sky to the street. So much for birdwatching. Ellen's head lands on her palm.

A sigh falls from the driver's seat. 'Same here. There can't be many places for an overgrown parrot to hide. We'll find it.'

There's a sudden flash of cyan light. Ellen's facing backwards, but it still takes her a second to recognise it.

'Grandpa!' she blurts out. 'I think we just passed Gwen!'

The RV near instantly skids into a U-turn, Ellen latching to the table before she's thrown into the corridor. It halts at the roadside. Ellen shakes her head. That hurt. Out the front of the RV windscreen, a blur of blue sprints up and towards them. Grandpa barely pauses long enough for the RV back door to slam shut before they spin and shoot onwards again.

Gwen lands in the seat opposite Ellen, breathing hard.

'Gwen, are you alright?' Grandpa asks.

Gwen groans. She slumps into the seat. 'No,' she says with feeling. 'I couldn't keep up. But I _did_ manage to snag a souvenir.'

A tired but smug smile crosses Gwen's face as she holds up her hand. It's a giant feather. She lays it on the table.

'Polly was shedding these as it flew. Give me a few minutes and I can go Wildmutt and sniff it out.'

Ben snorts. 'Oh sure, let's wait on _your_ watch. Meanwhile, Doctor Freakazoid's out there doing who knows what with the electronics he stole.'

Oh boy. Ellen drops her attention down to the feather. It's massive, at least the length of her arm, and a dull off-white. She swallows. Imagine the size of its claws close up. It could pick up the entire RV, probably.

'Well, if you'd turned into that giant stink bug, then you'd actually be helpful.' Gwen smiles simperingly. 'Oh wait, you couldn't,' she adds. Ellen shakes her head and tries measuring the feather against her arm.

Ben shoots back, 'It's Stink_fly_, and I don't see you flying after him!'

'I can't!' Gwen says, standing. Her hands hit the table with a thump. 'And who cares what you call that—'

—is wings easily glide through the uncaged air. They slide from the rushing warm to the quiet cool, never disturbing Sir from the helm. Some wind falters. Momentary setbacks. A far cry from the pitiful, pathetic _cage_. Frightened younger birds scream as his shadow falls over their resting places. He could snap one from the air, easily… but that would shake Sir from his place. They have their nests to fly to.

Air shakes under his cries: loud, louder, loudest. He flexes his claws, rolling eyes fixated to a gull. Come closer, come closer.

Sir joins his cries. Foreign sounds, _human_ sounds, but these ones are a balm compared to the _cage_. 'Phase one complete, my fine feathered friend! Now… take me to the National History Museum! _Now!_''

There's a _pull_. He banks, following the tug, and he roars away the tension. The _pull_ builds, sharper an—

'—hit a pothole,' Grandpa says apologetically.

Ellen jerks her wing backwards. Her back hits the chair. It's quiet. The feather rests against the table, large and white. The phantom touch claws into Ellen's skin. It crawls, like ants.

That.

What.

_What_.

She sucks a breath in, sharp like a sob, but she doesn't heave. She just holds it. She holds her breath tight, tight like a hug, and her skin keeps crawling. Ellen's arms are hugging herself. When did that happen? She's mad. She's crazy. She's a freak.

She's… she's a freak. No way, no way that was real, right? Right? Overactive imagination. That's all it is. Right?

But if that is real, and what Ellen saw, felt, was, was real, and she really did _be_ whatever just happened, then, then... her brain hurts an awful lot trying to parse whatever thought she's trying to express.

Out the window a street sign flashes past. It's too quick to read.

In a sudden burst of speed Ellen gets up and guns for the RV's back drawers. Absently, Ellen notes that she stampeded her way right through Ben and Gwen's conversation, but the vast majority of her mind is too busy screaming to give it much thought. Her hands move like automatons.

'Hey! What gives?' Gwen says.

Ellen pauses. Oh, she's holding one of Gwen's shirts. Why do her clothes all look the same. Nevermind. Ellen throws it aside and keeps digging.

'Ellen!'

'I, I have an idea,' Ellen says. Can't talk, she'll sound crazy. Can't talk, she'll sound crazy. She _is_ crazy, but sounds like doesn't equal quacks like if she keeps her trap shut. 'Ah _ha_, gotcha,' Ellen says, pulling loose Gwen's laptop.

As Ellen forces the computer open, dodges Gwen's snatch, and slides back into her seat, Grandpa says, 'Any idea at this point is a good one. But we could use more details before you break Gwen's laptop.'

Wake _up_, stupid slow technology, and please let Gwen not— she does not use a password! Thank goodness. 'Hold on, Sir, I'm finding a map. Where are we? Because, if we can't see where the bird is, maybe—'

'Maybe we can figure out where they're going!' Ben finishes Ellen's thought. He's right above Ellen's shoulder, peeking at her typing. He then stabs the screen, ignoring Gwen's dismay. 'Here, we're here. And the bird was going _that_ way.'

'Way to use your words, tweedle dweeb and dumber,' Gwen says with a scowl.

Ellen's already scrolling out, eyes scanning ahead of the bird's path.

There it was, where is it now, and is its _now_ where her brain claims…?

And in Ellen's mind, her hurricane dies.

The cursor hovers over a small icon of a museum. A moment later, a helpful tooltip declares it a wonderful place to visit.

With a gasp, Ben vocalises the thought. 'Ha, alright! Check it out, the National History Museum's right where Polly was flying. That Animo guy said something about turning Washington DC into _BC_, so that's got to be it! Where else can you get all prehistoric?'

'A zoo's graveyard?' The words slip from Ellen's mouth. She stares after them. Where did that…?

'The museum's not too far from here,' Grandpa calls back to them. 'Everyone, back into your seatbelts.'

The laptop vanishes. Gwen looms on the other side of the table, laptop in hand. Her glare is solid rock.

'Meanwhile, _I'm_ going to do some digging on this Doctor Animo.' She sets the laptop down, fingers flying.

'What, you think he'd put his evil plan on the _internet_,' Ben drawls.

A smug smile crosses Gwen's face. 'He has a massive chip on his shoulder _and_ a doctorate. There's no way I won't find something.'

Quietly, Ellen lets her back, then head, hit the seat. Her gaze lands somewhere at the ceiling.

Okay, then. Okay. This is good. Great, even. Maybe her insanity isn't _just_ attention seeking nonsense. It _is_ nonsense. Maybe not attention seeking? Maybe, maybe, maybe. Say, where did their shopping go? The trolley vanished. They must've left it behind when fluffykins came after them. But, wasn't it missing before? Did Grandpa deliberately ditch it...? Actually no, no she doesn't want to think about the trolley. Ignoring her craziness won't make it better. Usually the opposite happens.

Or maybe she's not crazy. Maybe Ellen actually has superpowers. Maybe the timing is just coincidence. Sheer dumb luck and coincidence made it land right as her cousins acquired their own powers.

Except, coincidence makes zero sense.

...Maybe "making sense" isn't a thing the world does anymore. Her cousins can each turn into five different aliens, after all. Either way, Ellen shouldn't make conclusions yet. They don't know for sure if she, well, her insanity, is correct.

A chime interrupts Ellen's train of thought. Gwen holds her arm up. The watch is back to normal, switched from cyan to pink.

'At least if you've screwed up, my backup plan's online,' Gwen comments.

'Did you two work out how long it takes to recharge?'

'No,' Ben says. He sounds frustrated. 'It's like they were trying not to let us know anything.'

'They're too inconsistent,' Gwen says. 'Also, next time you want on my laptop, you'll need to ask for permission. It's now password protected. Times three.'

There's heat on Ellen's cheeks. 'Sorry,' she mutters. Gwen's nose climbs a few degrees into the air, her fingers and gaze flying across the keypad.

* * *

Grandpa drives in silence for minutes, each second dragging its feet. When the RV screams to a halt Ellen could scream with relief. She doesn't. Doesn't mean she didn't want to.

'Gwen, let's go,' Grandpa says back into the RV.

A groan precedes Gwen, along with the crocodile snap of her laptop shutting. Her expression is stormy as she lands on the sidewalk.

'I _just_ found an article on Animo,' she complains. Ellen glances her way and Gwen elaborates. 'He was doing illegal experiments on animals.'

'_Really_, I had no idea,' Ben drawls. He strides off towards the dark silhouette of the museum.

'If you gave me five more minutes, I'd know more than that. You know, like _why_ he's doing this now instead of five years ago? That's when he was still a veterinary scientist,' Gwen adds to her remaining audience.

Grandpa pats Gwen's shoulder. 'Good work, Gwen,' he says consolingly. 'Let's not fall behind.'

As they approach the museum Ellen feels, more and more, that she should've volunteered to wait in the RV. What, exactly, is the point in her tagging along, exactly? Museums aren't usually open at night and usually just have a skeleton crew of a night shift keeping their eyes open. So, it's not like the campsite, where Ellen could help a highly tiny number of people to evacuate. Ellen can work on researching Animo. She can keep her eyes on the sky in case Animo flies away when they aren't looking. There are a hundred and one things Ellen can do that don't involve walking closer and closer to a pale hole in the museum's wall. Yet the words jam in Ellen's throat. Her feet keep stepping alongside Grandpa's.

When Ben bobs down beside the rubble, Ellen doesn't say a word. When he straightens, another large feather in his hand, Ellen stops breathing, but can't speak.

'Something tells me we're on the right track,' Grandpa says. 'Good thinking, Ben.'

Ellen doesn't make a sound.

She does, however, give every feather she sees a wide berth.

In stories, sometimes there's a cave the heroes walk into with stalactites and stalagmites tethered to the roof and floor of the mouth. And mouth, in those cases, turns out to be true, for the cave suddenly is not a cave, but a throat. There are other signs. The floor feels squishy and wet. The air is damp and foul scented. The most important sign, however, is the sudden looming sense of dread. Walking through the museum's hole feels like that. It has the same dread, the same prickle on the back of Ellen's neck that whispers _something's going to bite you, teeth will slam down on your shoulders_.

Unlike a cave the museum's mouth doesn't lead to a suspiciously throat shaped tunnel. It leads to a museum. Somehow, that's even worse than a throat tunnel. In silent prison sit boxes of glass. Their contents are invisible in the darkness. The sickly green light did nothing to make them more visible. Hallways of stuff hang in total stillness, the spaces between each wide and uncompromising. Then her eyes adjust. There's scattered, frozen, dried starfish in one. Hanging above their heads is a whale in frozen suspension. It's too dark for it to cast its own shadow, but its maw alone is out of comprehension. There's nowhere to hide; their footsteps are far too loud. At the same time there are far too many places someone standing still could slip and stab. The creeping at Ellen's neck whispers again.

It's too dark, too empty, too quiet.

Museums, Ellen decides, suck.

'Where are we?' Gwen asks. The atmosphere is catching. Ellen has no idea how Ben feels free to stride without a care into the empty, watchful floor, but Gwen stays with Ellen, rooted by Grandpa.

'Ocean hall,' Grandpa says easily.

On a second inspection, Ellen should've guessed that. Grandpa barely needed to give the walls a glance.

Grandpa says thoughtfully, 'If Animo wants to bring Washington DC back to the stone ages, my guess is, he's somewhere in the Human Origins section.'

'Then what are we waiting for? Let's find Animo and his creepy crawlies already,' Ben calls over his shoulder, and vanishes through an archway.

When Ellen follows she checks the ceiling. Just in case. She doesn't see any teeth.

Ellen can't remember the last time she went to a museum. She probably visited one on a school trip at some point, but no matter how Ellen asks herself, herself doesn't deign to answer. Yet her eyes shut and under them she can see the towering bones of some ancient bird, standing tall over all the humans in the room. She can see an obelisk surrounded by empty, solemn space, and in the distant sit two cannons overlooking a great hill and a distant city. Then she blinks. The moment passes. She is in the dark, surrounded by the bones of humans encased in glass, with skull's empty eyes gazing back at her, spears grasped in clawed phalanges.

They walk through the entire hall, Ellen glancing over her shoulder the whole time. She keeps her eyes peeled for disturbances. Knocked over artefacts, displaced dirt, loose feathers, the whole array. Gwen spots the first feather. Ben shushes them all.

'_Listen_,' he hisses. 'You hear that?'

Faintly, faintly, and through another archway, Ellen strains her ears. It sounds like a sound. But it's so soft, she isn't sure if it's real or if it's her mind playing tricks on her. After all, her mind certainly has a habit of that. Ellen bites her lip. Well, that's not totally accurate, since the hole in the wall did sort of prove _some_ of what Ellen imagined was real. That, or she actually had super senses, and her brain decided to hallucinate in order to process the information. ...No, that's absurd. That has too many hoops to jump through, and there's some principle that goes against complicated things. Occam's razor, right? Right.

In the span Ellen spends thinking, she draws a few hesitant steps closer, ever drawn after her family.

There is a loud clatter.

They freeze.

Silently, Grandpa meets each of their gazes, and gives each a significant nod. He motions them to follow him. Slowly, slowly, they step through a door into a wider space. Bones. Ellen can see a lot of bones. All of them are things Ellen does not want to examine too closely. But they have to get closer, and the closer they get the louder a ticking, mechanical sound gets.

There he is.

Animo, thankfully, has his back to them. This also, unfortunately, means that whatever stuff he's tinkering with, it's out of sight and blocked by his body.

Ben stalls beside a podium, plucking something red from it. It's only facing Ellen for a brief moment before Ben's hand drops to his side. It looked like packaging from the supermarket they'd left behind. Good to confirm that Animo didn't shoplift from multiple sources, Ellen supposes. She can't see the frog-toad or the bird anywhere.

Maybe Ben made a sound, slipping the box off the podium, but Ellen spots the second they'd been made. It's pretty obvious. Animo's back straightens, his head snaps up. Oh, and he talks, that's generally a sign of someone knowing people have snuck up on them.

'You are very persistent, I _hate_ persistent.'

Animo spits the last out like it personally wronged him. Maybe it did. This is okay, Ellen decides, stepping back to stay behind her super-powered cousins.

'We all know about you and your freakazoid experiments, Doctor Animo. It's over!' Ben says.

'Oh, but it's only just begun,' Animo says.

He turns in place. It's the first opportunity Ellen's had to examine the guy. Maybe it was just the lighting, but his skin looked green. He looked like he was some brand of ill. Red-lensed goggles glinted under a stiff metal helmet, which in turn had the horns Ellen had seen back in the supermarket. A machine is strapped to his chest with a round dial in the centre.

His hands look clawed as Animo gestures.

'See, I only needed a few components to push my work into phase two: the re-animation of dormant cells.'

Ellen's stomach plummets.

Her eyes are uncomfortably drawn to the human skull on a nearby podium. No. No way, that, that isn't… Ellen wants to think "that's not possible!" Unfortunately, a lot of impossible things have happened in the past few days.

Ben says, 'Uh, does this guy come with subtitles?'

'Breathing life back into that which has been long since lifeless.' Animo's voice is unsettlingly maniac as he turns, a hand trailing across the leg of a model elephant. His hand then clasps against his chest. His grin has too many teeth and the machine _screams_. 'Observe!'

Red light surges, flowing up the helmet's horns and up, far over their head height and directly into the model elephant. No, not an elephant. Oh, good, that's a mammoth. It's bathed in red, orange, yellow, and Ellen is drawn to its eyes. She can see the moment where it shifts from a glassy, empty stare to alive and filled with blazing anger.

Good. This is good. The gasps of her family do not help calm her heartbeat's speed.

The elephant brays, tossing its great head, and pulling free of the podium like a bull breaking loose from chains. The floor shakes under the sheer weight.

'Behold the genius that is Doctor Animo!' Animo bellows from somewhere. Didn't he say that already? Ellen can't see him. The whole reanimated mammoth is a large distraction.

Something snaps inside the mammoth, like a rubber band. Or a tendon. The head twitches towards their little group, their little and fragilely human group, and abruptly Grandpa's arm is between Ellen and the mammoth.

Gwen steps forward, already dialling her watch. 'You three go after Animo, I'll stop the circus reject,' she says firmly, and slams the pink watch down.

Pink light blares and the mammoth reels back for a moment. There's a confusing memory in Ellen's head—like blinking after looking at a light—of a tangle of limbs and crystal, but Gwen is standing in seven feet of glory, having become the shiny blue alien composed of crystal.

As Gwen launches forward, arms suddenly sharp and gleaming, Ben waves his arms.

'What!? No way, I'm taking care of this!' Ben says.

Ellen grabs his hand before it can touch his watch. 'Isn't this what you wanted? A chance to fight the bad guy instead of the distraction?!'

'Uh.' Ben's eyes dart away from Ellen's. 'Y-yeah, obviously. This way!'

Ben leads the charge left, towards a doorway that Ellen hopes Animo did go through, and that they didn't make a mistake in running at. Behind them, worryingly loud thumps, shouts, and trumpets shake the air. It's all good though, right? Good, it'll be good, please let it be—

—You have got to be joking, Ellen thinks.

The giant bird occupying the hallway is not a joke. In fact, it is a very loud screamer.

'Looks like it's my turn!' Ben declares, and hits his watch.

Again, light and an impression of limbs warping in the blink of an eye. This time it's the giant bug, already airborne with his wings buzzing. Before the bird can do more than chirp, a green gunk fills the hallway, and its wings are pinned to the wall and floor.

There's also a horrific stench from the goo plastered all over the floor.

'You and your aim stinks,' Ellen croaks, trying to breath through her mouth.

'It's called _Stink_fly for a reason,' Ben says, his voice croaky and nasal through the alien's throat.

'Come on, after Animo,' Grandpa urges.

'Way ahead of you, Grandpa!' Ben says.

He buzzes down the hall and dives out the other end. Grandpa hurries after him. A flash of red light lights the hallway for a moment, and if that's Ben's watch timing out already, he will have every right to scream about the unfairness.

Ellen's left in the hallway alone, with the bird furiously struggling against the… spit? Puke? Sap? Ellen shudders. 'This is going well,' she mutters, carefully picking her way through the… puke, puke is probably the best word. The last thing she wants is to get stuck to the floor in the same room as the murder bird, even if Grandpa somehow managed to avoid it at a sprint. 'Very, very good, very well.'

Ellen exits the hallway.

There is a dinosaur roaring in the room.

Why.

Ellen throws herself to the floor as the t-rex's tail swipes overhead, clipping the doorway as it goes past. Bits of stone crumble and strike the floor beside her. She covers her head a moment too late.

'What an inspiring beast! But my dominium is ten times as terrific!' Animo yells.

Ellen hears Ben scoff from the other side of the room. Unfortunately, the roar of Animo's device is too loud, and from the floor Ellen has the perfect view of the red light hitting a skeleton hanging from the air.

Oh, Ellen doesn't know what that dinosaur's called. It's the flying one, starts with P. Probably more than capable of swallowing her in one gulp. Good. Good, good, good.

Ellen scrambles out of the way as the pterosaur drops from the ceiling onto the floor, the one Ellen had been cowering at a few moments before, that one.

'I'd love to stay,' Animo calls. Is he—? He's sitting on the t-rex's neck. When did he get there? 'But I need to claim the award I so richly deserve.'

Animo has white hair. Funny, that. Not something that Ellen should pay attention to right now, but noting fashion is better than panicking out of her mi—_sweet Jesus_ —nd about dying. The pterosaur is _fast_ and snaps at Ellen's ankles, tearing a scream from Ellen's throat.

A toad whips past, colliding with the pterosaur, and sending both crashing into the wall. Both howl and hiss with rage.

'Just stay down!' Ben complains, wings droning loudly. Ellen flips onto her feet and barely catches a glimpse of the t-rex's tail disappearing through yet another hole in the museum wall.

Ben can take care of all this, right, there is no way Ellen can do anything meaningful against two turbo mutants. Better to run away and hide. Good plan, Ellen, she deserves a pat on the back for that one, absolutely. That thought in mind, Ellen takes one quick glance over her shoulder to check where frog and flappy are, and runs for the hole in the wall.

Ellen nearly falls over in relief to see Grandpa already there, frantically scanning the streets for Animo. He gives her a quick nod.

Back in the museum, neither beast is down. Ben buzzes to a spot between them and the outside world. 'Aw man, not good,' he says, eyestalks twitching.

'If these two get out onto the streets, who knows what kind of havoc they could cause,' Grandpa says worriedly.

Two of the eyestalks turn towards Grandpa. 'Stop the freaks from freaking the city out? Got it. They're not getting past me.'

The pterosaur roars, wings flaring. On the opposite corner of the room, the toad steadies itself, looking like it'll jump any second.

'...You wouldn't mind going back in the corridor so I can goo you up?' Ben says hesitantly.

The frog moves first, launching itself into the air to the side of Ben and striking out with its tongue. Ben grabs it, wings flaring, only for—ow, that looks like it hurt—the pterosaur to full bodily tackle Ben to one side. It gets up faster, body twisting like a paper plane towards the hole, only for Ben to grab its tail and use it like a baseball bat against the toad, which, incidentally, had used the distraction to nearly crush Ben and—

—and already, Ellen's lost track of everything that's happening. Her palms itch, begging for something, _anything_ to do, something that might help.

Ellen seizes a piece of rubble the size of her chest and shoves it back into the hole.

Well done, Ellen, her thoughts mock. You made the hole a fraction of a percentage smaller.

'...Doctor Kelly accepts Verities Award,' Grandpa's voice says.

'What?'

How can Grandpa possibly stand there, perfectly calm, and read abandoned newspapers when there are two monsters (four if she counts the mammoth and bird) wrestling with her cousin inside? On second inspection he lacks joviality and casualness, so, Ellen's absolutely judging too fast, but, but, oh forget it. Ellen abandons the next rock and hurries to Grandpa's side.

_Doctor Kelly accepts Verities Award_, declares the newspaper title. Ellen skims over most of the yellowed article, which is mostly about some biologist person and a few mentions of other scientists who were nominated.

'Look who's in the background,' Grandpa says, tilting the paper towards Ellen.

The photo shows two men shaking hands, one holding a golden statue shaped like a beaker, standing in front of a small crowd. Front and centre is a hooked nosed man in a suit, looking sourly at the man with the award. Presumably, award-man is this "Doctor Kelly," and the other….

'Doctor Animo?' Ellen says. 'He, wasn't he saying something about an award? Is _that_ why he's doing all this?'

If that's his goal, he probably knows exactly where that award is right now. The four of them know nothing, have no idea where to go to follow him without relying on finding a news station, which will slow them down, and they have the mutants to take care of before they can do anything else, and it's not like Ellen and Grandpa can do much against a t-rex and a crazy doctor by themselves.

'But we'll never catch up to them,' Ellen says.

'We don't need to. Instead of finding them, we find where they're going, just like the museum.' Grandpa taps on the newspaper, on what looks like a scribble in the margins Ellen squints. _515 3rd St SE, Wash DC_. 'Look at that. Animo must've been holding onto this for some time. How likely is it that's where Doctor Kelly is?'

Oh, good. That's one problem solved.

'Grandpa, I don't want to sound negative, but Ben and Gwen are a bit busy. And at this rate, they'll turn back long before they can get a chance to follow him!'

Grandpa nods, eyes combing over the hole— oh, when did Gwen get there? Gwen's helping Ben beat back the mutants, but two against two doesn't do much to even the odds, from the looks of it. There are little mounds of shattered crystal everywhere. As Ellen watches, the toad dodges a line of puke as the pterosaur breaks out of a small crystal band. They're escaping their prisons faster than they're made.

Paper rustles. Ellen starts as Grandpa palms the newspaper to her. He strides forward towards the hole.

'Gwen, Ben!' Grandpa calls. 'Don't trap the creatures inside the room. Trap them _inside_ the room!'

'You just said the same thing twice!' Ben shrieks.

'Grandpa, you're a genius!' Gwen says, at almost the same time.

Gwen skids to a halt beside one of the doorways and punches the floor. Crystal bursts out of it, growing and growing, thicker and thicker until it's completely sealed. With an 'Oh, I knew that,' from Ben, he swoops past and spits up more puke, sealing any last gaps in the hole, Gwen cracking the pterosaur in the face before it can pluck Ben from the air.

The pair trade distraction duty. One moment, Gwen is throwing up walls of crystal, the next, Ben scoops up a large piece of rubble and throws it in the way. It's a blur of motion until, finally, Gwen's at the hole right in front of Ellen, and maybe Ellen should back up a ways.

Yes. That seems like a good plan.

The crystals make a strange sound as they grow, Gwen's eyes turned to slits from the effort. It's like someone flicked the edge of a wine glass, or traced their fingers lightly along the top. It's a tall hole, much taller than the doorways, and at first the crystal at the top is thin and brittle.

'Gwen!?' Ben yells. 'Any time now!'

'Almost!' Gwen grunts.

There's a gap in the centre, Ellen notices. Through it, the pterosaur's wing flashes, barely present for an instant.

Suddenly Gwen staggers back, releasing the floor, and falls onto her back.

Her chest heaves, like there isn't enough air around her.

'Ben! Now!' Ellen yells.

Please let her actually be done, don't actually be halfway there and taking a break…!

There's a long pause filled by flapping wings, snarls, croaks, rubble moving, and a droning sound steadily getting louder, and louder, and—

Ben abruptly streaks through the gap, a ribbon of semi-solid puke following him, and a rock crashes in place over the hole. Ben spits out the ribbon and does an about turn, hacking up more green slime over the hole even as several thuds shake the wall.

Gwen still sounds out of breath. 'Think that'll hold them?'

Ah, right! Ellen hurries to Gwen's side and offers her the newspaper. 'It will,' Ellen lies. 'We figured out where Animo's going. Think you can get there before Animo does?'

Gwen groans. 'No way. Even if I run, I'll time out halfway there.'

'Good thing we're not running.'

'What?'

Wind buffets Ellen, wings buzz, and Gwen is yanked directly upwards in Ben's grip. Faintly Ellen hears, 'Ben! Put me down! Ben!' and then they're both out of earshot.

It takes them longer to vanish from eyesight, but that's because Ben abruptly turns ninety degrees and ends up behind a skyscraper.

Okay. Okay, that happened.

Ellen's legs give out. She hits the ground, hard, and grabs blindly for her knees.

'You're good, you're _good_, you're okay,' Ellen hisses. 'Stop it. This is fine. You're fine. They're the ones in trouble, _you_ are fine. Stop it.'

Headlights flare over Ellen and she flinches, throwing an arm up. The RV rumbles to a halt beside her and, barely audible over the engine, Ellen hears the window wind down.

'Well, I see they didn't need a ride,' Grandpa says dryly.

'Hi, Grandpa,' Ellen says. _Bang!_ goes a monster against the crystals. Ellen flinches and points behind her. 'I think— I just, I don't think that's going to hold them for long.'

'Then best we get out of here,' Grandpa says sternly. Ellen is happy to oblige, running as fast as her wobbly legs will let her to the door. Once Ellen's shut the door and in the front seat, Grandpa kicks the RV back to life and the museum melts away. Grandpa adds, 'We're not going far, just enough so we're not pet chow.'

'Oh. Good, that's good,' Ellen says.

'The important thing is they bought time,' Grandpa says. 'My guess is, if they break Animo's transmitter all the animals he's affected will go back to their original state. The longer it takes for them to break out, the less time they have to endanger the city.'

Ellen considers this. It… it seems like a good theory. Ellen doesn't want to think about what it might be like if Grandpa's wrong.

Too late. The image is vibrant and far too real. A dripping maw clashes its teeth centimetres from Ellen's face, desperately trying to bite, not caring what injuries it may gain in the process. Guns fire, flashing, and Ellen squeezes her eyes shut—

Handbrake creaks. Key twists. Engine dies.

A hand settles on Ellen's shoulder.

'Hear that?' Grandpa says.

Hear… what? Ellen tilts her head and listens. There's… cars rumbling in the distance. A siren. Muted shouting. It's much louder for night time than Ellen expects. But then, this is a city. City's are loud.

Then—

'I heard a thump,' Ellen says uneasily.

'So did I,' Grandpa says. 'Sounds like they haven't figured out the crystals are harder to break than the walls. If those stop, then it means our theory is right, and we can head over to pick Gwen and Ben up.'

'What if they come back here?'

'Gwen has her phone. We can coordinate.'

They lapse into silence. The siren sounds more and more insistent over the intermittent pounding. Bit by bit, Ellen can see more of the surroundings outside. It looks like Grandpa drove around the corner of the museum. She can see the hole in the wall, well, the rubble littering the ground in front of it. The wall itself blocks the way to seeing the hole. Car lights drift back and forth, but never cross closer.

Nothing happens.

The mutants don't burst free. Animo doesn't reappear, cackling. Ben and Gwen don't topple out of the sky. Nothing happens. The thuds don't stop, but they do slow.

Slowly, Ellen lets her shoulders relax.

The next thud sounds more like a crunch.

Grandpa stiffens.

So does the next.

And the next.

Grandpa quietly turns the engine back on. Ellen reflexively checks her seatbelt. Wait, would it be better to have it unbuckled so if, say, one of the mutants picks the RV up— wait what is Ellen saying, she'd go straight through the windshield. Stupid.

In the end it's a heavier sound than breaking glass, but it certainly shatters. The shadow of the pterosaur swoops up and into the air. For a split second Ellen can see starlight through its thready wings. It circles the empty air above the car park, yowling its victory.

It's flight wobbles.

Below it, a lost car abruptly bangs, something bouncing off its roof and onto the ground.

'What the—?' Ellen says.

The pterosaur's gone. One moment it was flying, and Ellen looked away for a moment and it… vanished. Oh.

Several more objects fall and clatter into the car park, thrown by the pterosaur's arrested flight. Nothing left but preserved, mildly damaged bones.

Grandpa urges the RV back towards the hole. The bones gleam in the moonlight, some cracked and others covered in grit. Ellen, once outside, nudges one with her shoe. It doesn't move, not under its own power.

A frog croaks. It hops down a step, throat swelling.

'...Think we can return this to a pet shop?' Ellen asks.

Grandpa scoops it up with one hand. Its limbs flail.

'I'm sure we can think of something,' he says. 'Come on, your cousins need a ride.'

* * *

It's early morning by the time they navigate to Kelly Industries. The lack of address hadn't given them any favours, let alone the traffic blockades. It took Ellen a while to figure out Grandpa was seeking them out deliberately. Which made some sense. They didn't have the address, so follow the wreckage left behind by the dinosaur. With that as a map, they're on the way there.

The police presence outside is also a problem. Ellen doesn't know what Grandpa said to let them drive right alongside the building's massive hole, but somehow they're allowed to park right beside the police car and the hole.

Ellen waits for Grandpa to leave. The door slams shut behind him. Ellen waits for him to appear through the windshield. He rests a hand on Gwen's shoulder and speak to both of Ellen's cousins quietly.

Okay. It looks like Ellen has a few minutes.

She leans across the driver's seat and tries to open the glovebox. It's locked. That's not a problem, Grandpa didn't take the keys out. Press in, rotate, pull out, and tah-dah Ellen has the keys.

This isn't the best idea, but it really, truly, was bugging Ellen the whole time they were driving past the many blockades and hurried detours. What was in that notebook? What did Grandpa write down? She'd planned to take a peek the next time Grandpa took it out, and he hadn't, so it is time for Ellen to take matters into her own hands.

It takes Ellen a few attempts, but with a grin she unlocks the glovebox.

...Where's the notebook?

The glovebox isn't empty. There's a few important looking things, a coupon, a sealed envelope, but there's no notebook. Not one. None. Ellen's mind buzzes as she pushes the paper back and forth, as if that would make something magically change.

'Let me go!'

Ellen sits up. Animo's halfway to the police car, struggling with his hands behind his back. He looks smaller in the daylight. Sickly. Like a student who's spent their days furiously studying and forgetting twenty of their meals each week.

'I deserve that reward!' he yowls. The police officer pushes him at the police car, and Ellen catches him roll his eyes. 'I've got it coming to me! I _want _it,' Animo wails. The door slams shut behind him, muting his shouts.

It takes a few minutes more of muted murmuring for Grandpa to lead Ben and Gwen from the policemen. Ellen scowls and locks the glovebox again, slotting the key back where she found it. Well, Grandpa has to take the notebook out again at some point. She can find out what hyper-intensive notes he took later.

'Doctor Ani-mo is Doctor Ani-no-more!'

'We know, Ben, I was there,' Gwen says. There's no heat to the phrase.

A bridge flashes overhead. They've hit the motorway, and Ben is far too pleased about his… no, their victory. Isn't _that_ a point of whiplash? It is for Ellen. From the sounds of it, Ben was the one to break the transmitter, but just like the museum and the robot back at the campsite, they worked together to reach that point.

'I know, I know. It's nice, having a cousin who's… ehh, half as skilled as me.'

Ben smirks at Gwen, but again, there's no heat to it. It's starting to scare Ellen. How long is this… this… comradery going to last? And will it detonate in Ellen's face before it's spent?

Gwen's eyes narrow. 'Half?' she says. The tension, barely there, vacates and she shrugs. 'Well, you did pick the best alien you could for that fight. Even if it's the gross, disgusting one.'

'What can I say, Grandpa's tutoring must've helped. I'm gonna be a real pro. You should join in, you know, if you're not too busy running around like a headless chicken.'

It's like the world readjusts and comes to a firm footing. Ben's smirk sneaks into smugness. Gwen's expressions tense. Thank goodness, the weird amiable atmosphere is fading fast.

'Really,' Gwen says flatly.

Ellen glances at Grandpa. He meets her eyes and shakes his head, looking fondly exasperated.

'Well yeah. You snooze, you lose,' Ben says. 'I'm gonna be the best hero ever. I'll earn my awards, and I won't even have to ask for them, because being a hero is its own reward. And you can be my dweebish sidekick.'

Gwen perches her elbow on the table. 'Well, if you're going to act so smug about it, I guess I'll start my own Steel Samurai collection.'

'Uh, it's called _Sumo Slammers_,' Ben says dismissively. 'And there's no way you're getting any cards. Not while I'm around.'

'Good thing I already made some headway, then,' Gwen says, and flicks her wrist. A golden rectangle appears between her fingers, but Ben's head is in the way before Ellen has a closer look.

'Where did you get that?!'

Gwen leans back, out of the way of Ben's wild grab.

'What, this? I found it while I was _playing distraction_,' Gwen says. 'I was going to give it to you, but now, I'm thinking it'll stay right here.'

Ben swipes one last time and, falling short, he slumps back onto his chair with a ground. 'No fair,' he whines.

'Hey, you got Animo's mutation box as a souvenir. I'm up for a trade at any time.'

Ben visibly fights himself. It's actually interesting, how his head jerks between the card, then the box he put Animo's transmitter in, then the card, then the box again, until with great effort he folds the cardboard box's flaps closed.

'You found it fair and square,' Ben says through gritted teeth and an even grittier smile. 'Being the hero isn't about rewards.'

There's a lingering silence.

Ben lunges for the card with a cry, and Gwen's almost too busy laughing to keep the card away from him. Almost.

* * *

**Where exactly does the toad ****go**** during this episode? Ben never defeats it. Last we see, it's jumping off buildings after the bird. And the anti-mutation "explosion" goes all over the city, so we know it has to be a regular toad by episode's end. And yes, a mutant toad features in S2E12, but I doubt it's the same one. It just vanishes after Animo gets a better ride. Jerk move, Animo, treat your pets better. I don't know, maybe I didn't watch the episode carefully enough and missed something. **

**The floor plan of Washington DC's museum, if it's anything like the museums where I live, absolutely would've changed its floor plan between 2005 and 20****19****. So… yeah, I cheated a bit. Also, I pulled a random place in Washington DC for Kelly Industries by going to Google maps and clicking. I have no idea what's actually there. I think it's in the residential area? Not sure. American cities are not my area. **


	3. Friends, Not Food

Low fog drifts over the evening. It rises from the lake in a thin film. The fog trickles into the treeline, lifts like a ghost into the sky, and makes a mockery of the moonlight. There are two faint silhouettes standing at its side, like sentinels, if those sentinels were children with torches. How they haven't frozen, Ellen doesn't know, but she's happy to stay at the back of the Rustbucket, with the rattling RV heater, while her cousins explore the lake. The window mists from her breath. Ellen glances backwards, past the bathroom doors. Grandpa is busy dropping the table out of the bed's way. Ellen bunches her PJ's sleeves and wipes the window clean as quickly as she can, shivering from the cold touch of the glass.

'If we had more space in the Rustbucket, we could've set up a terrarium,' Grandpa says. The mattress falls softly. A full bed appears where once there were two chairs and a table. It's almost magic.

'We need another bed, not a terrain— a teh, um.'

'Terrarium,' Grandpa repeats.

'Terrarium,' Ellen says. 'What's that?'

'It's like a fish tank, but without water. Or it's only half-submerged. You keep plants or animals in them, like frogs,' Grandpa explains.

The hook for the upper bunk is stiff. It nearly bites into Ellen's thumb, but she steadies it and lowers the bunk down.

It had taken Ellen a full hour after they'd left Washington DC to figure out which beast Animo had. Toad or frog? Ellen is almost positive it was a toad. After all, it had bumpy skin and there was no water in sight. Plus, toads are types of frogs, so it's like calling a square a rectangle: true, but lacking specification! It didn't lay any eggs so Ellen didn't know for sure, but she has strong evidence of toadish natures.

Hang on, why did Grandpa just say frog?

'Why do you want a terrarium?' Ellen asks.

'Well, that frog needed a home,' Grandpa says offhandedly. 'Ah, don't worry about it, Ellen. Just an old man thinking about missed opportunities. It's always a mystery when you don't know what might've happened.'

Ellen tries to imagine it. A glass box, perched on the counter, with a little toad (which apparently was a frog? Well, Grandpa must be right) bobbing in the motion of the RV. Wait, would they need to give the frog a seatbelt? Can frogs wear seatbelts? She perches on the edge of the bunk, trying to wrangle the image. By the time Grandpa's switched the overhead lights off, Ellen's lying on her bed imagining a royal purple helmet on a frog, with biker goggles, zipping through the air in a sci-fi personal space ship.

It's about then that the door slams open, cracks against the R's sides, and Gwen is there howling.

'_Grandpa!_' she says. The light snaps on and Ellen throws her arms over her face. Gwen's drenched, water dripping down her hair and spitting against the floor. Gwen says, 'Ben splashed me with water and pretended to drown then he turned into four arms and got all this goop over him to look like a monster!'

Grandpa quickly pulls a towel and Gwen's pyjama's out, ushering her to the bathroom. 'You must be freezing, pumpkin,' Grandpa says. 'I'll talk to Ben when he gets back.'

'Thanks, Grandpa,' Gwen says. She sounds exhausted.

Ellen rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling. No, she shouldn't say anything, Gwen looks like she'll bite off her head, even if the name's Ben's fault. Ask in the morning. There's no sense in…. Oh, forget it.

'Isn't four-arms a little….' Ellen waves her hand in a vague gesture. The bathroom door is shut. Ellen quickly adds, verbally, 'You know, lame?'

Gwen scoffs. It's muffled through the door. 'Of course _you_ couldn't figure it out either,' Gwen says. 'It's four arms, not _four_ arms.'

...That did not make it any clearer.

Gwen somehow senses Ellen's lack of understanding. She yanks the door open, dressed all in pink, and jabs her right hand at her left arm. 'What's _this_ called, doofus?'

Ellen bites her lip. 'Um. An arm?'

'Ugh, what _part_ of the arm?'

'...The upper arm?'

'Right.' Gwen shifts her pointing past her elbow. 'So what's _this_ called?'

'The forearm,' Ellen says with more confiden— _ohhhhhh_. 'Oh,' Ellen says out loud.

With another roll of her eyes Gwen throws herself into the lower bunk. 'He has four arms, and the most important part is the forearms of the four arms. _Ugh_.' Gwen's voice is abruptly muffled. Presumably, she buried her head in her pillow. Ellen can only assume she got the correct "fore/four arms" when Gwen spoke.

'...That's neat,' Ellen says quietly.

From the sounds of it, Gwen's the one who came up with the name. When _did_ the two of them invent names for all their aliens? And who is responsible for each? Ellen's not about to ask either, but it's an interesting thing to wonder.

Ellen leans forward and peers out the window. Ben is nowhere in sight, Four Arms or otherwise. All Ellen sees is fog, and lake, and more fog, and more fog, a few trees, more fog… she's overstating the fog, but they're by a lake. Lakes are fog machines. The fog bubbles below the water and slip out in plumes of steam, the steam settling all over the forest. Only faint lights

'Are you sure you saw anything in this?' Ellen asks. _Are you sure Ben really pranked you? Are you sure you're not making things up to get Ben in trouble? _Or, the most twisted of possibilities, _Gwen's trying to play a prank on Ellen_.

Gwen kicks Ellen in the back.

Nevermind. Ow. Ellen settles on the bed, turning so her (sore) back is to the rest of the RV, leaving her a nook of shadow. She knows well enough that her cousins and Grandpa are good about shifting their claimed bedding around. Ellen already finished her shift on the mattress. Now, even though the cousins rotated, she still has the same pillow and blanket. Checkered yellow, both of them. And inside the pillowcase? A small, yellow bracelet. No offense meant to it, but Ellen doesn't want to risk putting her hand in her pocket and then suddenly getting even more memories from it.

Or, the worse option, someone else picks it up and they're infected with the same thing. Ellen doesn't think that's a possibility, but when it occurred to her, Ellen dearly didn't want to let it have even a chance of coming true. Ben with this ability? Gwen? Grandpa? Some random stranger? No, Ellen prefers it if the only one doubting her sanity is herself. Even though the ability has proven itself as real. Ugh.

Ellen tugs the bracelet from the pillowcase, wincing as her fingers hit the beads. Nothing happens, just like the last few times. Ellen stuffs it back with a scowl.

Another thing that lacks developments: Grandpa's notebook is _gone_. Evaporated! Stolen by fairies! Ellen hasn't even seen him pull it out once since the last time she saw it. So, the last time she saw it was the _last_ time she'd see it! And there can't be that many places someone can hide a notebook in an RV. She should've stumbled on it even by sheer dumb luck by now.

Why does she care so much, Ellen grumbles to herself. Maybe it was a missed opportunity, and that's why she's so attached to finding it. She didn't seize an opportunity and now her brain's stuck with the possibility rattling in her brain. Grandpa must've tossed it once he had a handle on how to teach the twins, so Ellen's trapped in a wild goose chase with everyone in the circle constantly calling "duck, duck, duck," but never goose. Never goose. Ellen runs as fast as she can, but no matter how fast she runs, the children call _quack_, never _goose_, and with every step there's an awful pounding in her head, pounding in her head, pounding in her—

Ellen shoots awake as the pounding isn't in her head. The door bursts open. It's so loud that it's like a kick to Ellen's stomach, matching the kick Gwen gave her to the back. Except, this kick is imaginary. Even imaginary, it has heft.

And in the doorway? Ben is there, gasping and dressed up in his four-armed red alien, water and leaf litter falling to the ground.

Ben takes a long moment to catch his breath. His arms sag against the doorway, chest heaving.

'I was just attacked,' he rasps out, 'by a giant lake monster.'

Huh.

Ellen leans over the side of her bed and says to Gwen, 'Okay, I believe you. Ben did turn into Four Arms and pretend to be a lake monster.' What did Gwen say? Ben turned into Four Arms and covered himself in goop? And that was done with the intention of scaring Gwen? With Four Arms in the door, Gwen's story checks out.

'I'm not pretending this time!' Ben says.

There's something about the way this alien talks, Ellen reflects, silently passing Gwen a spare white pillow. It's slow and methodical. Slow enough that by the time Ben finishes speaking, Gwen nails him in the face with the pillow.

'You already got me with that one,' Gwen says, voice taut with tiredness.

'But—!'

'Come on, champ, joke's over,' Grandpa says. He speaks without turning his head or even opening his eyes. He doesn't even turn the light on for Ben. 'Get some sleep. We have an early day tomorrow for our fishing trip.'

As Grandpa speaks Ben's watch slowly chimes and, eventually, times out with a red flash. It takes Ben a little longer to change and pile into the mattress on the floor, but frankly, Ellen doesn't care. The last thing she wants is to be tired when they're _fishing_.

* * *

In the fable, the boy who cried wolf ends with death. The more gentle stories claim that the boy, screaming, wailing, sobbing for help, is stuck helplessly watching as the wolf rips the flock of sheep to shreds. In the harsher tales, it is the boy who is the victim.

But take the thought back a bit. The fable begins with a boy tasked to watch the sheep of the village. Caught by a flying fantastical bit of fancy, the boy runs into town that night, howling that there is a wolf in the paddock. The village quickly gather themselves and race to the paddock, only to find the sheep calm and the boy laughing. The next night, there is another scream, but when they rush to the paddock all that's there is moonlight, sheep, and the laughing boy again. It is the third night that the village refuses to be fooled again. Or, perhaps they are numb to the alarm.

Meanwhile in the paddock there is a wolf. It is far worse than the faint imaginings the boy conjured when planning his prank. It simply stands there, watching him, and the boy's throat is sore from the shriek. And the wolf must know the boy is there, for he screamed, but no people rush up the road with their torches and pitchforks. And as the boy realises, with dawning horror, his mistake, the wolf stalks forward.

In the gentle stories, the sheep are eaten. In the harsher, the boy is intimately acquainted with the stomach lining of the wolf.

The moral of these tellings is to be wary of making false alarms, for those around you will be jaded, and when you truly need them they will never come. On the next morning the village will wake and find no boy. No sheep. Will they find blood and wool? Will they find the boy's remains? Or will they think poorly of the boy again, and think this is yet another joke. _Release the sheep, make every heart stop when they see the empty grass!_

How long will it take to know the boy will never come back?

But those are just the first two versions of the tale. There's a third ending.

In the dark of the night, a shape wanders down the lane. Moonlight casts long shadows from its back, from the trees, from the tall and crooked buildings. The first household isn't awake fast enough to scream. Neither is the next. Nor is the next.

By the time the sun rises the village is empty.

* * *

Ellen's half surprised she didn't vibrate herself off the dock in excitement. But she survived to get on the boat, survived it chugga-chugging away from the docks, and all she has to do is wait until they're far enough to fish.

Gwen seems unhappy. She's looking like she wants to slump against the railing, but the water is too near for her to commit. Then again, she _did_ ask Grandpa if she could stay behind. She sighs, looking at her blue watch.

'At least I can get back to shore fast,' Gwen says, dropping her arm.

'What's up?' Ellen says. She puts the fishing rod back in its holder and joins Gwen, and is promptly distracted by the wake below. The boat roughly slices through the water, confused bubbles rolling away from boat and vanishing as the distance grows. It's not bright enough to see to the lake's bottom. There's just the blurry mist of deep water, and a few glimpses of the boat's hull below the surface.

Gwen looks up. 'Cloudy, with a chance of grossness, wetness, and boredom.'

It's overcast. It always seemed like there was better fishing when it was cloudy. The fish were more awake. Dawn and dusk are tricky to reach, so a cloudy day was more reliable, especially factoring in Pythia's slow start in the mornings. Sure, on most days the poor weather ended with getting drenched and laughing their heads off, but it was well worth the cold. But the weather isn't what Ellen asked.

'Weather forecast only gave a twenty one percent chance of rain,' Ellen says, recalling the radio's segmented chatter.

'Anything interesting to catch…' Grandpa says, off in the distance.

Ellen says, 'Fishing's fun. You relax, take in the sights, and just when you don't expect it— snap!' Ellen claps her hands together like a crocodile. 'A fight for the ages! You, a fish, your line, your hook, your rod, and the open waters, battling it out for freedom and food!'

'...breakfast as chum,' the fisherman Shaw says scornfully. Ellen can hardly hear him over the rumbling engine.

Gwen does not look enthused. 'The "sights" look exactly the same as before we left the pier,' she says.

Of course _Gwendolyn's_ too uptight to enjoy a nice day out. Urgh, who was it who planned their summer down to the hour? Typical. You can't plan in fishing, so no wonder _she_ dislikes it. Honestly. How does Gwen handle living if she refuses to let the waves take her for a spin. Ellen vows to push Gwen into the water at some point. When they reach the fishing spot, Ellen will know how far it is to go back to the RV. All Ellen then has to do is wait for them to head back, and she'll have a mental timer towards pushing Gwen off the docks and into the water. And, it will be after Ellen shows Gwen exactly how fun fishing can be. Easy peasy. Unless the person to be convinced is a princess. Which Gwen is.

Across the boat Ben's voice is a higher pitch. It's much easier to hear than the adults'. '...just keeping an eye out for the lake monster. That thing's not taking me by surprise this time!'

'Come on, princess,' Ellen whines. If all else fails, right? 'Snapper, kahawai, trevally, they're all better fresh and you don't even have—'

'Whoa, there it is!'

Ben's shout carries clearly over the boat. Gwen's head snaps up. Within a moment she's leapt from one side of the boat to racing to the other, skidding to a halt beside Grandpa.

Ellen follows at a more sedate pace. With the water wobbling, it's hard to keep Ellen's balance in a rush. Makes her way to and then grabs the rail, peering over the side just in time. In the water, a collection of twigs, leaf litter, and rubbish drifts past.

It… it doesn't look like anything of interest. It certainly doesn't look like a monster, especially when compared to, say, the stinkbug.

Gwen looks unimpressed. 'Where's what?'

Ellen watches as the pile drifts and bobs in their wake, and eventually passes out of sight past the stern. Okay, Ellen can understand wanting to fool them yet again, but she and Gwen were nowhere near this time. What gives? Why cry wolf now? Did Ben honestly think they'd be scared? ...Well, Ben did get them to run to his side of the boat at speed—

Ellen quickly backs up from the side of the rail and eyes Ben warily. Pushing someone in the water is _her_ plot. Ben can't steal it. ...Wow, maybe pushing Gwen in isn't such a good idea, if Ellen's so dead-set against falling in there.

'Oh,' Ben says. 'My bad.'

'Now, Ben,' Grandpa chides gently, 'this is a fishing trip. Not a monster hunt.'

Well, what's going on in Ben's head is none of Ellen's business. And it's probably just yet another prank. Like pushing someone into the water. Where it is cold. And wet. And cold.

...Or there's actually….

Nah. Can't be. Lake monsters are not real.

A voice crawls out from the depths of the trawler. 'It's called the krakken,' Shaw utters, and Ellen nearly slips in her haste to turn around. She _just_ thought that lake monsters aren't real! Don't knock that thought off kilter by giving it a name! And isn't a krakken a sea monster, a _fictional_ sea monster?

'You know about it?'

'It's my business to know about it,' Shaw says. He pluck what looks like a photo from his pocket and extends one reedy arm towards Ben.

Without hesitation, Ben strides forward and takes it.

'I've been on its tail for years,' Shaw says. Ellen peers over Ben's shoulder and sees a glimpse of a shadow and neck, before Ben scowls and tugs it away. 'Folks say my rudder's not right….'

'Why doesn't that surprise me,' Grandpa mutters behind Ellen.

'Sighting's go back hundreds of years on this very lake. Some say it's a myth. Not me.' Shaw steps back into the shadows as he speaks, taking hold of the wheel and gazing out into the distant horizon. Ben stares up at him, eyes wide in wonder. Ellen plucks the loosely held photograph from Ben as his attention's clearly wandered off. Shaw says, 'I could take you to a spot where I personally laid eyes upon the beast. That is… if you've got the stomach for some _real_ adventure.'

Examining the picture… yeah, that's not real. No way. There is no option where it exists. Ellen offers the photo to Gwen.

'I guess so,' Grandpa says.

'This is the surgeon's photo but worse,' Ellen complains to Gwen, pitching her voice low. 'So not fair.'

'Surgeon's photo?' Gwen says, taking it.

'Yeah,' Ellen agrees. 'I looked at that for months when I found mum's newspapers. This one, the quality's so much higher but you still can't see….'

Wait, what in the world is Ellen talking about?

It's a good thing Gwen took the photo. Ellen's fingers are numb and not from the cold. Ellen nervously hooks them into her life jacket. What in the world was Ellen talking about? Gwen's attention is fully on the photo, so, it doesn't look like _she_ thinks Ellen said something off. After all, Ellen's never seen the photo of the Loch Ness monster before, never studied it, trying to figure it out. That's not Ellen. Ellen shivers.

'You know,' Gwen says slowly. 'Aliens are real. Who knows what else is?'

That is a terrible thought, why did Gwen suggest it. Ellen is fine living in a world where krakkens stay in fiction. 'Next you'll say bedbugs are real, or Santa,' Ellen says, voice wavering.

'Oh _please_. I'm only thinking about it. Just in case.' Gwen taps her watch meaningfully. She adds with a smirk, 'And monster hunting's _so_ much better than fishing all day.'

Gwen primly marches to the rail, leans against it, and gazes out into the distance.

Ellen raises her hands in disbelief. '_Monster hunting's better than fishing_, ha, _not_,' Ellen grumbles, pitching her voice higher at the quote. 'Fishing's _fishing_, let's see you catch a monster and eat it for breakfast, _oh look_, it's broken your line, now you're without a monster _and_ you're hungry.'

'Stop muttering and start watching,' Gwen calls.

They stay at the rail for some time. The clouds grow heavier, filled with storm and filling Ellen's head with doubt over the weatherman. The waves grow choppier, whipped by wind and presumably the current. Ellen sees no fish. She sees a few twigs bobbing and the waves breaking against the shore. No Krakken. No monster. No movement from Ben's direction intending to leap overboard to get a closer look or renew a pretense.

If Ben does jump overboard, step one is to kick Gwen and point. Step two was to grab the life preserver and if Ben decides to go code green, chuck it in the opposite direction so Shaw doesn't see Ben the alien. There's something… not quite stable about the fisherman. There's a harpoon gun right by the preserver and Ellen doesn't want to know how the watches handle piercings.

Then, the engine's pitch dips. Ellen grabs the fishing rod, heads for the bow, and stops as she sees why they've slowed.

Beyond the bow of the boat is a line of buoys bopping in the waters. A yellow tape hangs between them, stretching like streamers across the lake.

Ellen squints. The writing, there, it looks like it says….

'Do not enter!' Shaw gruffly shouts. 'What's going on!'

Grandpa joins Shaw in looking ahead of him. An odd expression crosses his face. 'Looks official,' Grandpa says. 'Maybe we should turn back.'

'Nonsense. This is my lake, and I'll go wherever I—'

'Fishing boat! Stop where you are!'

The voice, though faint, rings out across the water. The ship in the distance looks like a launch. It's certainly cleaner and more impressive in appearence than Shaw's trawler, espcially as the ship pulls up, horn blaring, roughly parallel to them. Even after its engines quiet, wake rolls away from it. Shaw's trawler bobs and dips from its passage. Gwen has to seize the rail to keep her balance, her face twisting.

It's always awful tricky to hear a neighbouring ship. Something about the lack of walls, so that half the sounds fade away into the distance rather than bounce and bounce and bounce to their respective ears. Ellen quickly crosses to the gathering of her family, straining to hear the blue-uniformed men.

'I am Jonah Melville, the founder of Friends of Fish,' one calls. Ah, that explains the F.O.F on the boat's side, not to mention the fishy stylization of the iconography. Whoever the speaker is, their voice is almost annoyingly clear in spite of the open air between them. 'We've closed this section of the lake for an environmental study. You'll have to turn your boat around.'

'Suppose you make me, fishhugger' Shaw growls, like he is the wolf and the uniforms are guppies.

Grandpa's smiling.

'Well, since I chartered the boat for the day, I believe I'm in charge,' Grandpa says. Shaw sighs, irritated, and Grandpa adds in a sterner tone, 'Isn't that right, captain?'

Shaw scowls and obligingly heads for the controls, muttering under his breath as he goes.

'But what about the krakken?' Ben protests.

His voice was clearly loud enough to reach the ears of the other ship. Laugher crosses the distance. It's the red-head, this Jonah guy. 'The krakken?' the man says, voice full of what sounds like mirth. He bows over the railing for a moment, seemingly lost in the humour. 'Not that old fish story.' Jonah straightens, his voice calm and authoritative. 'Look, I'm a marine biologist. And anybody who tells you they've seen a "monster" in this lake is casting without a hook.'

The engine of the trawler kicks up a few degrees. It gives the impression of the F.O.F boat drifting backwards. But, Shaw does what Grandpa says and turns the ship around. The F.O.F joins them and keeps pace. It looks like they're travelling with an escort, for now.

'Think we're going back to the pier? We've spent hours out here already,' Gwen says, joining them at the rail.

'We can't go back now,' Ben complains. 'Just because these _friends of fish_ or whatever say we have to stay out of that part of the lake, doesn't mean we can't search the rest of it.'

'I agree! We can't go back yet,' Ellen says. She whips the fishing rod from behind her back. Gwen starts. What, she hadn't seen it? Ellen wasn't trying to hide it or anything. Wait, Ellen nearly hit her. Whoops. Ellen barrels on. 'W-we haven't even cast one line yet. If you're _that_ interested in looking for monsters, I can fish while the boat's moving. It's easy, you just hold on tightly and if the hook suddenly gets heavier, you've got a proper bite!' Ellen glances up at the hook, still firmly around a ring. 'The bait falls off a lot, though,' she adds.

'Who cares about fishing when there's a _real monster_ to catch?' Ben scoffs. How dare he.

'If there's _actually_ a monster in the lake it's been here for a hundred years,' Gwen says. 'I'll check if there's been any mysterious disappearances around this lake, but for all we know it's just another animal and there's no reason to go hero. And we _still_ don't know if it exists.'

'There's no way it's real,' Ellen says. 'The captain's depth meter's only gone down three metres as far as I've seen. Any substantially sized monster couldn't move without disturbing all the water around it.'

Ben turns to the captain's cabin, pulls a face, and says, 'It's deeper elsewhere. You don't know it isn't.'

Interesting. Ben doesn't elaborate further with more options. If it were Ellen making things up, she'd have added _and it could be small enough not to disturb the water_, but he didn't. It's not like Ben could know Ellen hasn't even glanced at the depth meter. She has no idea how to read it properly. But Ben didn't protest with it being small… so, Ben might be telling the truth. Good. Great. There's a lake monster somewhere, lurking.

Hopefully, Gwen's right and it doesn't care about humans.

* * *

Ellen relaxes as the pier inches back into view. It won't be long until they're back on the shore, back on the ground. Sure, there are people around, but if she's careful she can still fish there. Fishing around a crowd isn't a good idea, and she won't catch anything, but it'll still be as entertaining as… as entertaining as….

...Wait.

Wait, hold on.

Has Ellen ever gone fishing before?

The thought hovers in the air before Ellen, silent, accusing. It grins at Ellen, nods once in a satisfied manner, then tips an imaginary hat. It fades like it was never there and had never left a sense of awful dread in Ellen's stomach.

Ellen looks at the fishing rod in her hand.

She doesn't drop it, but she does put it back exactly where she found it and tries to figure out if any memories attacked her when she picked it up. Ellen doesn't think there were any. Those things are noticeable. It feels like she's in the wrong pair of shoes every time it stops. When it starts, it feels like it hits Ellen like a brick to the brain. She, she should've noticed if that happened. So then, was all that because of something that already happened?

Well. Okay, that's all good. She was enjoying herself, being excited, and she hadn't lost anything because of it. Yeah. She can live with liking fishing. Sure. Good. Ellen nods, once, and promptly remembers Grandpa hired the fishing rods as well, so they will be returned the moment they step on shore. Drat.

Ellen starts trawling through memories, trying to figure out how to hire, build, or steal a rod for herself.

'—found us! Look!'

What?

Ellen twists. Look past the stern, beyond Ben's pointed finger, and a shark's fin cuts through the water beelining straight for them. Ellen instinctively glances down to her life jacket. All the buckles are done up, all the straps are tight, and Ellen's moving towards the life preserver before she can think twice.

Huh, Ellen thinks, as she realises she's made her way right by it. Maybe those memories are good for something.

'The krakken,' Shaw says darkly.

The fin dips under the water thirty metres off their stern. Ellen's head whips around, her eyes sweeping from the trees to the waves to the trees to the waves again and are they swelling? Are the waves swelling? Ellen clings to the boat a half second before it bucks, waves crashing into themselves with the slapping weight of the krakken's passage. Grandpa's across the way, an arm around Ben, the other reaching for the railing. Gwen's seized it with both hands, her head fixed in the krakken's direction, and then there's no more time to take in the sights as the boat crashes back to the lake's surface. Ellen clings for dear life. The image of the harpoon, not far from her head, flashes through her mind, and Ellen hopes with every fibre of her being it doesn't jar loose and smack her loose.

'It's heading for the docks!'

Shaw's shout comes from the cabin. A horn wails from their ship, the engine pushing as hard as it can even among the chaotic waves.

Ellen looks up. The waves are thrashing, but calming. Why? In the distance, a shape rips itself from the water. Ah, that's why. The krakken's farther away. It's the size of Ellen's finger from the distance, but since the buildings are ants, the contrast is very present and very alarming.

Then Ellen notices their bow. The bow is empty. Gwen is gone.

A white shape the size of a raisin punches out of the water. There's a flurry of movement, and the white shape shoots backwards, skims like a stone across the lake's surface, and vanishes underwater some hundred metres to their starboard.

'Told ya! It's real, the krakken lives!'

'Sail now, gloat later,' Grandpa directs. He and Ben look more stable, Grandpa stepping between Shaw and Ben. His voice is quieter as he says to him, 'Someone has to rescue those people.'

Ben nods. 'Going Stinkfly,' he says, hopping the railing. There's a dim flash of light just over the side.

Ellen waits.

Stinkfly does not appear.

Ellen grabs the preserver and runs to the railing, not sure how she'll tow a giant bug onto the deck but ready to give it a shot. But when she looks, there's no giant bug with tentacle eye appendages. Floundering in the water, barely keeping its shape, is the alien made of molten metal and electronic circuits. He seizes the life preserver, balancing carefully on it.

'I said Stinkfly, not Upgrade! Stupid watch,' Ben's voice says, a ring on the alien's head flashing green in time with Ben's voice. And it _is_ Ben's voice. That's what throws Ellen. It's literally Ben, just electronic. Or, do all the aliens sound exactly like her cousins, just with different trappings— Ellen get it together this is _not_ the time for pondering!

Think, Ellen, she orders herself. What does this one do? It was the shapeshifting one, right? But there were limitations to it, and Ben calls it Upgrade because— _oh!_

Ellen runs and grabs the small harpoon gun. 'Catch!' she calls, tossing it Ben's way.

The half-liquid form of Upgrade meets the harpoon halfway. The colours spread across the harpoon, sudden parts materializing where others weren't, and when the living harpoon gun landed on the life preserver, it looked like someone's sci-fi creation ready to roll.

'Now _this_ is more like it,' Ben says. He spins, takes a second to aim, and a harpoon blasts from its barrel, a black "rope" trailing loosely from it. 'See ya,' Ben calls, and he and the life preserver speeds like a banana boat towards the shore.

'Good thinking, Ellen,' Grandpa says.

The next few minutes are composed of… waiting, and waiting, and waiting, as they approach the shore. Somewhat ahead of them, the F.O.F boat tacks, swinging around to head back the way they came. And as they turn, the krakken turns, giving Ellen a good look at the teeth that look about the same size as the boat the krakken's holding like a teddy bear. The krakken roars. It sounds like the pterosaur from Washington. Then it tosses the boat away and slams into the water. It vanishes below. How deep is this lake?

Shaw curses, wrestling to face the wake before it can reach them and capsize the ship. Grandpa helps Ellen stay steady, and Ellen's increasingly thankful she knows for a fact she'll float, and knows for a fact that her life jacket is sound, and it is bright orange to better attract rescueer's attention, and that there's no way Gwen or Ben will leave Grandpa behind. The fact that Grandpa is _not_ wearing a life jacket is increasingly worrisome.

The krakken rears out of the water before the F.O.F ship. The white shape, Ripjaws, hops through the water like a dolphin after it. Ellen can faintly spy flashes of green still by the shore. With a swat of some appendage, the F.O.F ship is sent skidding sideways across the lake, water barely giving way, risking capsize in one move.

Ripjaws reaches them then. The bulk of the krakken's in the way, and between that and the bucking of Shaw's trawler Ellen can't see where Ripjaws goes after that. But the krakken eventually roars. Some part of Ellen assigns it as a frustrated roar, but it's too far and too alien to Ellen's knowledge to understand. It's swallowed by the waters. Several seconds pass, and the krakken's bulk pierces the waves, but now a hundred metres back the way they'd came.

Shaw's at the bow of the ship.

Ellen hadn't noticed it before. There's a very large, mounted harpoon gun, at the bow of the ship.

There's a sudden squeal from over the side, and Ellen looks down to see Gwen, regular human Gwen, in the water.

'Man overboard!' Grandpa calls. Shaw turns, face already set into a scowl. Grandpa says, 'Shaw, Gwen is overboard. Bring the boat around!'

Ellen swipes the binoculars from the cabin and trains it at the shore. Everyone there looks good and— ah ha, there's Ben. 'Ben must've gone over as well, but he's made it to the shore.' Ellen lowers the binoculars and beams at Grandpa. 'Guess we have to go pick him up. And then… we can go fishing somewhere else?'

* * *

Barely a minute after they get to shore, the F.O.F have signs up. They declare the lake closed until further notice.

* * *

'I _told_ you the krakken was real!' Ben declares, for the eighteen and a halfth time. The _half_ was because when they reached the shore, Ben had gestured and pointed, but he was so out of breath the words didn't leave his mouth. But Ellen can extrapolate. He wanted to boast, so it counted as half a declaration. 'It was the same thing that tried to munch me last night. Captain Shaw and I were right!'

They, like many, _many_ of the other folk, are packing up to move on. If they're fast enough, they may even get an hour away before pulling over at the next campsite. Well, Ellen and Grandpa are. Gwen's wrapped in a towel, shivering, with her laptop on her lap. Ben's supposed to be helping, but he's been distracted by himself, so he isn't. So, Ellen doubts they'll be ready before Grandpa's deadline.

The difference between this boast and the other boasts is that, this time, Grandpa's present and paying attention enough to hear it. The other times he was busy checking on Gwen, then returning their equipment, then talking to Shaw to get some of their money back from the charter since their day was cut short (no luck there, apparently). Then he was packing the RV, trekking to get more fuel because the next leg of their trip headed into the desert and he wanted an extra tank just in case, then a shopping run, and on and on until it was evening and he'd set a fire so Gwen would look less sorry for herself, and he'd finally heard Ben's boast.

His expression, upon hearing it, is surprisingly stormy.

'Just because he was right about the krakken doesn't mean I was wrong about him,' he says. 'I want you to stay away from that guy. He's trouble.'

'You're just being stubborn,' Ben the pot says.

'Don't you just hate people like that?' Gwen drawls.

'We're leaving this to the experts, Ben, like those Friends of Fish guys.'

Gwen hums in thought. 'I don't know about _that_, Grandpa. One of them nearly let themselves get eaten because the krakken tried to take their "lunch",' she says, even making quote marks around _lunch_. She catches her laptop before it can falter from her knees. 'But I've been checking the history of this lake for the past thirty years. Even if they have reports about the krakken, they've been nothing like this attack. No mysterious disappearances, no significant dips in fish population, nothing.'

'Let's just be glad you weren't eaten by the wolf,' Ellen notes.

'It's called the _krakken_, not the _wolf_,' Ben says.

'She's talking about the boy who cried wolf. You know, boy keeps telling the town there's a wolf, and when there's actually a wolf, nobody comes to save him?' Gwen glares at Ben's vacant disinterest. 'Have you ever picked up a book?'

Grandpa cuts in before Ben can respond. 'We have no business meddling with this. Just let this be the one that got away, son.'

That… rings wrong.

That evening after dinner, Ellen steps outside into the fog and climbs the tree about the RV. She perches her chin on her hands, lying on her stomach, and watches the distant mast-lights bob in the muddy fog. For once, she's out there with a specific goal in mind and not just because she wants to clear her head. Clearing one's head is always a good thing to do regardless, but she is there for a reason. Hopefully, it won't come to pass.

But Grandpa's reason rang wrong. Let it get away? What happened to seizing the moment, else it will eat at you? But then, Grandpa didn't say that. He said it's always a mystery when you don't know what might've happened.

Ellen thinks… yeah, she doesn't like mysteries. The bracelet is a mystery. Where the watches came from is a mystery. Where Grandpa put the notebook and what he wrote in it? Mystery. Why Animo's plan kicked off when the Tennyson's were in town? Mystery. Krakken? Mystery. Mysteries suck, so much.

The small shape that just dropped from the RV's vent isn't a mystery.

Ellen carefully climbs down the tree and follows Grey Matter. Ben, in other words. He is not stealthy. Stealth, that's Ellen's area of expertise, so he doesn't notice Ellen until he finds himself plucked into the air by the back of his shirt.

His shriek of fright was one hundred percent worth waiting in the cold for.

'I thought you said Grey Matter's useless,' Ellen comments, walking the same way Grey Matter had headed.

Grey Matter folds his arms with a scowl. 'Under the right circumstances, a smaller stature is more efficient.'

'Um. Right, good,' Ellen says.

'Look, I'm going to find the Krakken, and I don't care what Grandpa says,' Grey Matter says.

'I'm walking towards the docks, not the RV,' Ellen points out. She steps down on a twig and half hops to avoid cracking it. 'I'll regret it the moment Grandpa find out—'

'Grandpa doesn't need to know,' Grey Matter says.

Well, that is borderline impossible, but Ellen's curious.

'What's the plan here?'

'Sneak on Shaw's ship, wait for the krakken, and if it shows it's slimy face? I go hero and I stop it. And since _you_ can't go hero, you can't sneak on board.'

'And your legs are so short, you'd be back to regular squishy Ben by the time you get there, and Shaw will be long gone by the time you can "go hero" again. And I don't plan on getting on the boat. You can sneak on board, but I'm staying by the shore waiting for the explosions to start, and then I get Gwen to pull you out of the frying pan.'

Ben's eyes narrow. They're goat eyes, so it looks creepy. 'I can take care of myself.'

'Sure.'

Ellen's shoes hit the docks.

They're damp from the krakken's earlier strugglings, or maybe that's just how all docks end up as: slippery, vaguely wet, slight fishy smell.

'There. That's Shaw's ship,' Grey Matter says. He scampers to sit on Ellen's shoulder.

'You need a life jacket,' Ellen says.

'I can turn into a living torch and a giant bug, and you want me to wear a life jacket?' Ben says flatly.

Ellen nods. Grandpa hired them from… there!

'You want me not to get Grandpa? Go steal a life jacket,' Ellen says. She creeps to a pipe and deposits Grey Matter beside it.

'Alright, wise guy, how do I take the life jacket out of the building? I can't make other things shrink,' Grey Matter complains. 'If you care about it that much, I'll get one of Shaw's spares.'

Ellen hesitates.

'Okay, you're good,' she says, taking him up again. 'Just… don't drown, please?'

Ben scoffs as they approach the ship. Thank goodness the fog is so thick. She can spy someone with a torch as they get closer, and if— oh darn.

Ellen drops off the side of the pier and lands in a dingy. The water slaps the sides in protest, and Grey Matter hisses in protest.

'What was that?'

That's Shaw.

Ellen stands, unhooking the dingy's ropes from the pier, and grabs the nearest pole. It's easier than Ellen thought to swing the dingy under the pier, out of sight, then flattens herself below the boat's rim, and when the torchlight spills over the side not a bit of the boat is in the light.

Shaw grunts, the light vanishes, and above their heads his shoes stomp away.

'Now what?' Grey Matter says.

Ellen seizes one of the oars—

—of shit!' Hansen hisses, dropping the rod.

'Dude, careful,' Logan says. The old bastard doesn't even look up from the lake. 'That's fifty quid you're throwing around.'

'What are you, a monarchist?'

'Never bothered translating dad's money spiel, no. Don't get blood on the boat, Smiles.'

Hansen rolls his eyes. Course _that's_ what he cares about. There's a rag at the bottom of the boat. Sodden with water, but it floats. It stings against the cut on Hansen's thumb.

'Can we go back now?' Hansen says. 'Walking wounded, here. Honourable discharge.'

'I'm not leaving until we have at least one bite,' Logan says. 'If you don't like it you can swim back.'

'Oi! It's my boat.'

'Not today it ain't.'

'You say that when I shove you over, see how you like it.'

'Oh, I'm sorry, thought you had some basic standards about boat hygiene. By all means, bleed all over the bloody boat and see how the men in blue like it, you heathen.'

Hansen smirks. 'Planning to off someone?'

'Might be.'

'Well, we're not offing any fish here.' Hansen takes the oars and pulls the boat further into the lake. 'We'll try for—

—pull herself ow shit why is her head pounding.

She's lying, back flat as it can be, in the hull of the boat. The back of her head hurts. There's a line across it… oh, she fell and hit her head. Ow.

Grey Matter appears, standing on her chest.

'Hello? How can I sneak on board with Shaw _right there_. If you weren't here, I could've gotten on board no problem!'

Idly, Ellen wondered at Ben still being Grey Matter, but most of her attention is on her very sore head. She reaches for the oars. They don't flash another image into her head… but a thought does occur to her.

'I know how to row,' she says, wonderingly.

'What?'

Ellen feels her way onto the bench, puts her back to the bow, and carefully pulls each oar free from its tether. One oar bangs, far too loud, against a pole, but there are no shouts of alarm. She pulls. The boat glides forward, bobbing in the waves, and a few drops of water splatter in the dingy as Ellen returns the oars to the water. A confused laugh bubbles in her throat, but Ellen doesn't let it out.

Ellen stops rowing a few metres away from Shaw's starboard, also known as the part facing away from the shore. She holds out the oar as far as she can. It barely reaches the ladder. Grey Matter bounces off Ellen's head, runs up the oar, and leaps onto the boat, nearly making Ellen drop the oar as he goes. He twists, giving Ellen a thumbs up, and climbs up and out of sight.

'Be _careful_,' Ellen says, but Grey Matter doesn't appear and reply.

Ellen rows out into the fog until the boat is only a murky shape. After a few more minutes, Ellen thinks she sees a flash of red light, but she isn't sure if she saw it, or if she only thinks she did. A minute after that, Shaw presumably is on board, because the motor kicks to life and the boat grumbles its way out of the docks and into the distance.

Ellen lets a shaky breath loose.

This is such a bad idea. Why did Ellen do this? This is a terrible, awful plan. What is wrong with her? Ben better find out something very interesting so they don't get in trouble for it.

* * *

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens for an achingly long time.

They're in so much trouble.

Ellen rows in circles. To match, her thoughts roll in circles. No mystery is worth life and limb, and Ben's on a ship with someone who is not quite right, little bit off, little bit not great bad etc. etc. She's wet, cold, worried, scared, ashamed, a hundred and one things because she _should not_ have helped Ben sneak out and now she's rowing in circles on a lake where it's cold and dark and has a krakken lurking under the surface and oh, fun fact, she just stole someone's boat!

Ellen swipes some water from over the side, shakes it out, and rubs her face. It's _freezing_. But it does the job of sending a shock to her system. Urgh, who knows what's in the water, that was also a terrible idea.

Where should she look? To the shore, where Grandpa and Gwen are sure to stride in at any second? Torches, waving across the dock, searching for them… or should Ellen look out into the lake, where at any second there might be tremendous waves and a flash of green light. Or red.

Ellen splashes her face again.

Hey, maybe she should toss the bracelet into the depths. That'll erase one mystery from Ellen's stock. Shame it's in her pillow. Ugh, what if Gwen or Grandpa find it while Ellen's away?

Stowing the oars, Ellen sits back. It's still cloudy. Imagine, a sky full of stars, with the lake reflecting them back. But the sky is cloudy and the lake is choppy. In a way, Ellen's suspended in fog above and below, like she's flying.

Ellen dips one oar in the water. She sends herself in a spin.

This is fine.

Everything's going good.

In the distance, something explodes.

It's like a firework from somewhere far away, but there are no colours in the fog. There's just a wall of fog that bubbles into existence several metres away. There's no visual cue for the sound. And Ellen, she freezes. Only her head moves as it turns the way it came from, the way it may have come from, but there's no follow up so how can Ellen know for sure? Answer: she can't. She can't know anything. There's a world full of mysteries and Ellen's not a detective.

But what Ellen does have are ears, eyes, senses, and Ellen can try and strain them as hard as she can.

Is that… are those gunshots?

Ellen's rooted in place. Soft _tat tat tat tat tat tat tats_ echo over the lake, but again there's nothing to _see_. Smaller booms like distant thunder follow, increasingly quiet, until Ellen can't hear anything at all.

It's always a mystery when you don't know what might've happened.

Ellen grabs the oars and starts rowing. It immediately hits her that, no, rowing is going to take a very long time, but she'll do it. Nobody else is out here. There is a whole lot of nothing out there, but she has to try. Right? That's _her_ responsibility, even if it's making her throat dry and her hands shake—but that might be from the cold water.

She's rowed far enough that she can't see the dock when a buzzing reaches Ellen.

'Hello?' Ellen calls, voice fading halfway through the word. Is it a good idea to talk when there are explosions? What in the world exploded? Who fired a gun? Ellen says, pitched to herself, 'Nobody? Good.'

A shape emerges from the fog, and before Ellen can draw a breath Stinkfly appears, dropping a sack onto the boat and landing himself on the stern. Ellen yelps, jumping to the bow to keeping their balance.

'What, what? What?' Ellen says.

That's not a sack. That's Shaw. Is he dead?

'Hold on,' Ben says, no, orders, why would— _oh geez why._

Ellen clings to the bench for dear life as Stinkfly, wings reving, pushes the dingy back the way they came at full pelt.

'Almost there!' he declares.

Ellen takes his word for it. She's too busy trying not to fall overboard. Red flashes above Ellen, and she hears Stinkfly groan for a moment.

There's a bright blast of light. The boat abruptly loses speed, and Ellen hears a splash.

Ellen waits. The boat does not disintegrate. She takes the oars and peers over the side, cautiously. Ben's head pops from the water, sucking in a gulp of air.

'I _hate _it when that happens,' he croaks, still treading water. He kicks his way to the side.

'What _happened_,' Ellen states more than asks. 'Oi! Climb up the stern, you heathen. You'll tip us if you try climb from the side.'

Ben scowls, but does as asked, probably thanks to Ellen taking hold of the oars. 'I'll tell you when we get to shore— whoa!' Ben falls into the boat, making it rock. He grabs the sides. It's only then Ellen notices that his eyes are a little wide, his breaths coming a hair too quick and shallow. 'Let's just get back to the RV.'

'Alright, I'm going.'

Ellen rows.

'...He's not dead, right?'

'Wha— of course not!'

'Did you check he's breathing? What if he's not breathing, that's not good— did he drown? Did the krakken drown him!?'

Ben's eyes flick down, then he's watching the fog again. 'He's fine. And it wasn't the krakken. The krakken's not the problem.'

Light spills across the boat. Ellen pauses her rowing, twisting to face the shore and—wow, the docks really got close—and there's a figure standing on the dock. It's hard to make out what with them holding a torch and pointing it right at Ellen's eyes.

'Grandpa!' Ben calls.

'You two have a lot of explaining to do,' Grandpa says.

* * *

Ellen wrestles with ropes as Ben recounts what happened on Shaw's ship. Or rather, what happened _under_ it, then what happened _to_ it, and then what happened in the boat chase away from it. Shaw woke up—thankfully he isn't dead—as Ben spoke, and joined the group in sitting on the pier.

Ellen shuts her eyes.

So. To recap. After Ben crawled on the ship, he changed back from Grey Matter after hiding under a tarp. Shaw only found him after the boat was well on its way. Shaw planned to dive and search for the krakken, and Ben had taken a wetsuit and joined Shaw when he wasn't watching. They found a pit that had a large egg in it, so Ben deduced it was the krakken's nest. Shaw started swimming to the surface, but when Ben broke the waters Shaw was in the clutches of the Friends of Fish. They interrogated Shaw, knocked him out, blew up his boat and went sailing off into the night. If Ben's watch hadn't recharged, he'd never have caught up with them in time.

'Wait wait wait.' Ellen drops the rope, finally satisfied with her knot. 'You're saying the krakken's after the Friends of Fish, and the Friends of Fish are after the krakken too? Why?'

Ellen's head races to come up with reasons. Romeo and Juliet are in a relationship, but their families disapprove due to an ancient feud, and now is the time where the tensions are high and their patience is finally worn thin?

'The krakken's nest was huge, but there was only _one_ egg in it. No wonder she's been attacking everything — Jonah must be stealing her eggs!' Ben declares.

Romeo and Juliet _is_ unlikely sounding, now that Ellen thinks about it. One half of the equation would have to be a fish.

Gwen says, 'And I think I know who Jonah really is. While you were gone, I looked into him and the "Friends" of Fish. They're not listed on any environmental website, but I did find Jonah Melville listed as a poacher of rare animals. He has arrest warrants in three continents! I bet those "lunch" crates actually had the krakken's eggs in them.'

'And the krakken took one of them back.' Ben's eyes widen. He turns to Grandpa. 'That must be where the egg in the nest comes in! No way Jonah would've missed one.'

'Looks like we both were a little too hard headed,' Grandpa acknowledges.

Something in Ellen's chest stops squeezing. Please let her be off the hook for helping Ben sneak out. Please, please, please.

'We've got to stop them. They said something about going back to a cannery.' Ben glances at Gwen, but she only shrugs. No data from that route, apparently.

Shaw stands. 'All this talk doesn't change a thing. Mommy or not, that beast is mine.' He strides away, heading for some dark corner of the dock. Ellen starts as he speaks again. 'Let's go. I've a spare boat at the end of the dock.'

Huh.

Ellen follows Grandpa's lead as he ushers her and her cousins onto the boat. It has a motor — a vast improvement over the dingy Ellen was using before. It wasn't much of an upgrade, though. Ellen can picture them all tipping over as Shaw steps down after untying—

The boat's drifting awful far from the dock.

Grandpa kicks the motor into life.

Oh. So they're doing this. Okay. Good. Ellen no longer feels bad about stealing someone's row boat.

* * *

Ellen wonders if buildings know how to look like a wolf. Do buildings take special acting lessons from an elderly barnhouse and are taught to loom, or to creak, or to be a black smudge against a blackened, cloud-filled sky? Do they know what lights to turn on to look like there are eyes, and then to shut them off before the viewer can focus through them?

Before, Ellen never really thought about how cans are made. But that's what a cannery is for, right? It's a place that makes cans. And for an abandoned building whose prior job description was can-making, the cannery has really taken it's spooky building lessons to heart.

Sure, there are people scuttling around it, but the lights make it hard to see them as people and not as flickering demonic shadows.

Grandpa cuts the motor just after they slip under the pier. They drift, like a ghost, over the water and only stop when Grandpa catches a ladder. Ellen absently tyes the bow's rope to one of the rungs, then reaches for it to follow Grandpa up.

'See if you can find the eggs,' Ben says, helping hold the boat steady.

Ellen can hear heavy footsteps clapping against the wood far above. The ladder, on the other hand, doesn't rattle as Ellen climbs. She pauses, looking back down.

'What are you two doing?' she asks.

'We're going to kick these "friends" of fish's tail,' Gwen says, dialing the watch. She hops off the side, and under the water there's a flash of pink light.

The water thrashes. In a wealth of frantic coughing, Gwen emerges from the water. It's hard to see her, since she's blue, but that looks like a raptor to Ellen.

'Really? XLR8?' Ben says, before vanishing in green.

Ellen looks away before she sees what Ben became, since she hit the top of the ladder, but from the sounds of the very loud splash... Ben didn't become what he wanted either. The air whistles through Ellen's teeth as she pulls herself up to meet Grandpa. Find the eggs. Simple enough. Good, she can do this.

The entire building shakes, nearly knocking Ellen off her feet.

Ellen takes it back! She can't do this! She absolutely can't do this!

There's no more boat in the darkness below. _Why_.

The ladder hadn't left them outside. They were in a very large room. Crates lined the opposite wall, with large doorways big enough to back a truck into them. A row of nasty looking hooks hang just above head height. They don't look sharp, but they do look solid.

Something roars outside. The krakken, has to be. Of course she shows up as they come to rescue her eggs.

'We better start searching,' Grandpa says. Ellen follows him to the boxes. She doesn't know where he got the crowbar from, but he wrenches open box after box after box. Fish, shellfish, fishing tackle, life jackets, box after box of nothing but noise — no proper signals to receive and make into meaning. And all the while there are roars and shouts and things going _boom_ that rattle Ellen's bones while she peeks over the boxes as a lookout.

Most of the poachers run past them and out the doors, towards the chaos, which is props to them for bravery and also helpful in avoiding confrontations.

Wood clacks against itself as Grandpa lowers the latest crate lid. He shakes his head, once, then beckons Ellen to follow him. Like a shadow, he ghosts to a wall and starts towards another doorway. Good, good, great, Ellen follows without a sound.

Grandpa pauses at the edge of the doorway, peering past it.

He turns, and then….

...Grandpa, Ellen doesn't know… what is that, sign language? What is he doing? Ellen stares, confused, as Grandpa makes a series of gestures, and she hopes her baffled expression is clear enough to communicate the feeling of _huh?_

A thought snakes into Ellen's head, whispering like a villain in the wind: _touching the oars taught Ellen to row, why not try that again?_

The thought hangs like a noose for a long moment.

It's certainly _a_ thought.

A hatch suddenly clatters beyond Grandpa, and before Ellen can do more than suck in a breath, there's a man pointing a gun directly at Grandpa.

Ellen freezes. Grandpa doesn't.

He sidesteps between Ellen and the man. 'Alright, buddy,' Grandpa says, his voice loud in their previous silence. 'We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.'

Ellen can't see around Grandpa. But when he starts backing up, Ellen can hear the other man's footfalls following, unflinchingly, after them. Or, towards them, because the man's walking forward, even as Ellen hopes and hopes and hopes she doesn't fall down the ladder into the lake— say, that's not a bad idea, is that Grandpa's plan? Ellen turns, scanning the ground. The hole is— there! Just a few more metres back—

A thick tail bursts through the wall ten metres ahead of Grandpa.

The krakken roars.

Grandpa's head snaps up. 'Go high!' he orders, and Ellen doesn't hesitate in leaping and grabbing— the hooks! Ellen clings for dear life as the tail sweeps through the floor below, ripping through wood like it was tissue paper, leaving the man to fall, screaming, into the lake. The impact must've jarred the machinery, because the hooks surge forward. For what feels like a minute, Ellen hangs with only her grip between her and plunging into the water. Which, normally, wouldn't be so bad, but the cold air coupled with the giant lake monster angry over egg theft makes it a lot more dangerous.

Ahead, the ground is solid again, and Ellen lets go the moment she— _where did that person c_—

—urn everything! The krakken's he—

—_o__me from!_ Wood, wood, wood, wood, wood, wood, pain. Ellen's on the floor. She's on the floor, feeling like she was just punched in the face. No, wait, there's a groaning man on the floor next to her. Ellen can recall him appearing as Ellen let go. The man shifts, about to stand, and a boot cracks him in the jaw. The man slumps, unconscious.

'I don't think I like the hard way, Grandpa,' Ellen says, blinking away yet another foreign memory.

'Well, I don't think the eggs are in here,' Grandpa says, already looking into the adjacent room.

Ellen scrambles up on legs that feel too small and follows. The first thing she notices are the guns on the wall. They don't look quite right. Then there's a map splayed against the window, a few radio receivers, but nothing like a crate with boxes of eggs tucked inside.

Grandpa strides to a desk, pulling open drawers. He makes a soft, _ah ha_, sound.

'Would you look at that,' he says, holding a leaf of papers. 'Invitations to a bidding war in New Jersey.'

New… something about that, that makes Ellen's head twitch. But she shakes her head and asks, 'Why New Jersey?'

Grandpa shrugs. 'Beats me. I bet there's all sorts of incriminating documents in here.' He returns the papers to their home, picking up instead a lighter. He clicks it open. No fire comes out.

'Guess they didn't get a chance to burn them,' Ellen says.

'No, guess they didn't. Come on, I think your cousins have wrapped things up, if the sound's anything to go by.'

Ellen listens carefully. He… he sounds like he's right. No more screaming from monster or human alike. The water isn't trashing like it's in chains. And Ellen can just about hear the sirens of a police bout and its motor.

They leave the room for the police to investigate. Outside, the pier is wrecked. It looks like the krakken wrestled with both it and whatever the F.O.F used to put up a resistance. Ellen can't see Gwen or Ben or any aliens around, but she does spy one of the F.O.F's wetsuits hung out in the lake on a stick of wood jutting from its surface. The police skiff emerges from the fog, horn deploying as it sees the cannery.

It occurs to Ellen that Grandpa, with his tourist-like flowers, must look like a very strange sight to the approaching policemen.

Grand leads the way to the end of the pier. It looks like he's scanning the waters for Ben and Gwen. Ellen copies, but… nothing. They reach the end as the skiff reaches the man.

Grandpa makes a disgusted sound. 'Good riddance to bad rubbish,' he says.

A growl of frustration splits the night. Ellen's gaze rips away from the skiff so fast she leaves blots of black on her sight. Shaw. It's Shaw, sitting in a rowboat, somberly staring at a net he's hung on a stick.

'I had one. I finally got me a krakken,' Shaw says, the boat drifting closer and closer to the shore. 'One of the eggs must've hatched, and the feisty thing chomped right through the net while my back was turned.'

Ellen squints. The net does look like it's broken, but it's hard to tell. After all, all nets already have holes in them.

'That _is_ a shame,' Grandpa says. A flash of cyan reflects against the water. Ellen turns, trying to spot its source, but flashes of light tend to be quick.

Shaw says, 'Nah. I know they're out there. And now, I know I can catch them.'

The flash of red light comes from just by the cannery. Ellen relaxes as Ben and Gwen hurry out from it, heading right for them. Gwen looks a little disgruntled, but flashes Ellen a thumbs up when she's close enough to see her hands. All clear. Problem solved. Eggs returned to their mother.

All's well that ends well.

* * *

'What do you _mean_, we have to do the dishes!' Ben complains.

'I didn't sneak out! I, I went out through the front doors and I know you saw that!' Ellen squeaks.

Gwen looks distinctly smug, sat on her bed while Grandpa, uncompromisingly, stands and gives their sentencing.

'I told you, Ben, to stay away from Shaw. And Ellen, I know you heard me say that.' Grandpa's eyebrows raise. 'You're lucky things worked out the way they did, but there's no guarantee it'll be the same next time.'

Ellen looks down at her feet. Urgh, why didn't she leave it, why didn't she just let Ben do his own thing and then get caught by Shaw while sneaking on the boat and then not get on the boat and on second thoughts Ellen has no idea what the correct course of action is here.

'If there's a next time, you'll say the same thing,' Ben protests. 'Stay here, don't investigate. The krakken would've lost her eggs if I hadn't gone out there!'

'I know, Ben, which is why you're not losing your video games tomorrow,' Grandpa says. Ben splutters, but Grandpa raises his voice. 'Get some sleep, you three. We have a long day of driving tomorrow to make up for today.'

It's with that finality that the conversation ends for the night. Ellen's still assigned to the top bunk, to be banished to the floor in a few more days. Gwen's in the bed underneath. Ben's with the floor mattress: the most very worst of beds. Grandpa shuts the light off, and they are supposed to sleep for the night.

Ellen lies back. The blinds over the rear window aren't quite pulled shut. Through them, she can almost see the stars. It's so murky from the night airs, but if she peers closely, it really looks like stars watching her watch them.

'Hey, Gwen,' Ben whispers, startling Ellen.

After a moment, Gwen groans, 'What?'

'I was right about the krakken.'

Ellen's about to say, _we know_, but Ben's tone isn't gloatful. It's muted, thoughtful, distinctly uncharacteristic. Ellen chooses to stay silent instead, let Ben talk, whatever.

And as Gwen doesn't respond, talk Ben does. 'But you were right. I shouldn't've tricked you yesterday. If I hadn't, we could've gotten the krakken's eggs back sooner. So… I'm sorry.'

'You're not getting out of the dishes, Ben,' Grandpa says.

'Oh, come on!'

'It is weird though,' Gwen muses into the darkness. 'First Animo, now the Friends of Fish. How lucky is it we found the watches, then just stumbled onto both? We're the right tool for the right job. The tools are the watches, and the jobs are—

'Heroes?'

Gwen scoffs. 'Yeah, heroes,' she agrees.

Ellen takes the bracelet out. She holds it in the starlight. It doesn't look yellow, like this. It looks blue, cold, and almost sad. Ellen swallows, then says, 'Do you think they're connected?'

'Well….' Gwen pauses for a long time, then says, 'Grandpa, you drive around America all the time. Is running into all this… normal?'

Grandpa takes even longer to speak than Gwen did. He's just a dark shape in the RV, one that Ellen has to crane her neck to even see.

'I, uh, well. I wouldn't say normal,' Grandpa says hesitantly. 'But who knows, maybe strange things happen all the time, and finding those watches, uh, opened our eyes to them.'

That sounds off. Ellen can't put her finger on why, but something about that statement sounds wrong. Grandpa shouldn't sound hesitant. Adults, they're always sure about everything. They know exactly how the world works and they always have a plan.

Except.

According to the bracelet's memories, that's false. That woman, Pythia, she was scared and worried and nervous about her wedding, right? And so was the man, Sam. And that other Ellen was worried and scared, too, for their sake. But, adults are supposed to be smart, confident, they're supposed to have all the answers. Sure, they can lie to kids if it's super important, like what her birthday present is going to be, and if dad is going to come home, and if they thought Ellen found a good hiding spot in hide and seek. But those are obvious and the adults only tell those because they're easy to see through. Ellen got the attic key when she turned ten, dad's not coming home, and no Ellen her hiding spot is terrible she should move before Ben enters the room. Obvious things, even if the adults never say.

Adults aren't supposed to be wrong. Adults aren't supposed to be scared. Adults are adults. Being _adults_ is what they do.

So if Grandpa doesn't know why they're running into things… and not small things, like house fires and petrol station thefts and car crashes, but big things like crazy animal lovers, then what is Ellen supposed to do? Is Grandpa scared? Is that why he tried for confidence, but he missed? Grandpa can't be scared. He's Grandpa. Grandparents are the adults of adults, they're never scared. Granddad's proof of that, and so's Grandpa. No, Grandpa can't be scared.

...Unless he's scared _for_ someone, like that older Ellen was.

What Ben and Gwen have done is pretty scary. They're good, but it's still scary when Ellen knows they're out there. If Ellen's scared… it makes sense if Grandpa's scared for their sake. Which explains why he said it like that. He's scared, but they're _heroes_. You don't tell heroes you're afraid for them, not when that can make them stumble. Right? Good. See, she found the reason. Everything's good.

Oh! That's why the statement sounds wrong. Giant animals attacking the city and a krakken smashing the docks are very obvious things. Ellen even heard what happened in Washington reported on the radio. It was accurate. So nobody's eyes could be opened to it unless the eyes were the eyes of the entire nation. It's terrible reasoning. So, it has to be something Grandpa came up with on the spot, and the reason Grandpa did that was because he was worried and scared about Ben and Gwen putting themselves in danger over and over again.

In that case… Ellen has an even better reason to keep her mouth shut about her own problems. Grandpa must be very worried if Ellen noticed. And it's an easy mystery to solve, the mystery of "what will happen if Ellen talks about her brain thing." Grandpa will have yet another thing to worry about.

No. Her problems aren't worth it. She'll leave that possibility be, and solve her own mystery by herself.

She'll solve this by herself.

She can.

Gwen says, 'So… we'll run into even more weird stuff, won't we?'

'Who knows,' Grandpa says vaguely.

'In _that_ case, _Ben_, you should cut down on the pranks. You never know when the wolf will bite.'

'Okay, geez.'

This time, when Ben falls silent, the four of them stay that way. At least, as far as Ellen knows.

* * *

**I'm just as surprised as you are that this didn't take another six months or so. Don't raise your expectations, please. I'm having fun writing away from the canon camera, in case you couldn't tell. That has the downside of significantly losing content to write about. Ah well. Shame that my action scenes are addicted to em dashes.**

**Now that I've had all ten aliens appear on screen:  
****\- Gwen has Wildmutt, Diamondhead, XLR8, Ripjaws, and Ghostfreak.  
****\- Ben has Heatblast, Grey Matter, Four Arms, Stinkfly, and Upgrade.**

**No, I'm not planning for them to acquire each others aliens.**


End file.
